The Life of Pie.

A photo-documentary of my first pie. The kind? Triple Chocolate Pumpkin. The recipe? Courtosy of Martha Stewart Living via this neat food blog. I followed the recipe pretty exactly except that I used German Christmas spiced chocolate and cinnamon cookies instead of graham crackers for the crust and cut out about a quarter of the required amounts of butter and sugar. (There's so much chocolate in it already, is so much more really necessary?) The canned pumpkin was generously imported from America by a certain Joshua as the Germans don't understand the importance of such things. The result? Amazing!!! Check it out.

Step one: Graham cracker/cookie crust, baked and coated with chocolate.Step two: Mixing mixing mixing ingredients - here we mix the pumpkin and chocolate fillings together while simultaneously playing with the pretty marbley patterns!

Step three: Pour delicious pumpkin chocolate filling into delicious spiced chocolate cookie crust.
Step four: Wonder what to do with the rest of the filling that didn't fit into the pan.

Step five: Bake to perfection and carefully* remove from oven.

*I say carefully because if you're not paying attention, you might almost drop the pie halfway out of the hot hot oven and end up sticking your oven mitt in the pie in order to stop it from capsizing onto the dirty dirty Studentenwohnheim kitchen floor. Not like actually happened.

Okay, okay, an incident comparable to
The Tragic Cheesecake Oops of 2006:

...by a certain sibling of mine, but not NEARLY as heartbreaking or wasteful. Just a slight bruising of my culinary pride.

Step six: Stop cursing and let the damned pie cool so you can dress it up with melted white chocolate. Theoretically one could cover it with whipped cream, but I was bringing it to the theater and didn't have any whipping cream nor an electric mixer and didn't want to spoil the ambrosial taste of the pie with such pleasantries.

Step seven: Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, how can this country not sell canned pumpkin puree?

Step eight: After wondering for a while about what to with the leftover pie filling, find and implement a recipe for pumpkin scones. Delicious, delicious, delicious spicy melt-in-your-mouth pumpkin scones. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.

Step nine: Post blog entry so that Jesse can read it before he goes to school.