[Elise] Key Lime Pie

Key Lime Pie is super easy. The hardest most time consuming part was zesting and squeezing the juice from 15 key limes. For those of you unfamiliar with key limes, they are about the size of a golf ball, making them both difficult to zest and numerous to juice. After a half an hour or so, the limes looked completely decimated.

Key Limes as compared to your everyday Persian Lime

The recipe itself it pretty straight foreward. Generally, it is:

Crust
11 graham crackers, crushed into crumbs
3 T sugar
5 T melted butter

Filling
1/2 c lime juice
4 egg yolks
1 14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk
0-4 t lime zest*

*The recipe I used called for four teaspoons of lime zest, however this is the most time consuming step and the final pie was almost overpowered with lime flavor and I think the pie might have been better with anywhere from no zest to two teaspoons.

For the crust mix well ingredients well and press evenly into a pie pan. Bake for 15 min at 325 F, then add the filling and bake for another 15 min (until the center sets, but remains a little bit jiggly).

Chill for at least 3 hours (I know, so agonizing when your kitchen smells like key lime pie!) then top with whipped cream and strawberries!

[Inez] Operation: Beautiful Bike (Phase 1)

Step one for my bike is a functional one: drop bars! My shifters came in the mail last week and Colin was kind enough to help me switch out my bars so now I have drop bars on my bike! SO AWESOME. Okay here are some pictures of the process:

First we took the old bars off and -- this was a little scary for me -- cut the cables. No turning back.

Look how naked my bike looks! But also, look at all that potential!

This was cool, I learned a lot about how bikes work. Look just above the wheel, see how there's a little gap where the fork fell down when we took off the .. I don't know what the part is called. The little cap on top of the stem. That grey that you see is ridiculous thick grease.

Holy goodness, new handlebars! This is before putting the new cables or bar tape on. 

Eventually the cables run through the brake hoods, get taped to the handlebars, and then come out in the center of the handlebars. The cables from the shifters also get taped to the bars, in the front where my palms aren't. So the bar tape goes on to cushion (and make the cables not uncomfortable), to give extra grip, and, obviously, for fashion purposes.

Cool things about my new setup: I got brake levers specifically made for people with small hands. Brakes that I can reach! So cool! Also cool are the bar-end shifters. Fancy bikes often have shifters and brakes integrated (brifters), but I don't like that. I had never used bar end shifters before putting them on my bike, but they're great. They're so conveniently placed and intuitive. Highly recommend. Also I think they kind of look cool.

We had a couple of hangups with the cable business. The cable for the rear derailer was too short! Which was pretty frustrating when we thought we would have the bike finished that evening. The bike store folks gave me a longer cable for half off the next day though, so it worked out.

Yeah, I know, I was going to do all white accents. They didn't have white bar tape without little holes in it (I like that tape on vintage bikes, but my bike is not vintage) and I was impatient. So, pink. I know, I know, it's so many colors on my bike right now. It's okay, I'm going to paint it! Right now it's kind of ugly -- but so much fun to ride!

[Inez] Bikes can be beautiful

I got a new bike in February. It is not beautiful -- in fact, I think it's kind of ugly. It's a road bike, but it came with flat handlebars and it's all black and yellow.. here, I'll just show you.

Let's just talk for a minute about the mish-mash of parts and colors. The frame is black, yellow, white, red, and grey. The hubs are orange. The little thing on the seat post (what is that thing called?) is red. The tires are black and purple. Aaaand my seat bag is green. Awesome.

It's got nice parts, though. It's a good bike. My job now is to beautify it. Oh, and switch the handlebars. I'm not into the whole road-bike-but-trying-to-be-a-mountain-bike thing. I just want a road bike.

So, with Colin's help (who knows so much more about bikes than me, or most of the population) here's the plan: switch the flat bars for drop bars, paint the bike, maybe switch the seat post thing, and eventually switch out the seat. The hubs I'm going to have to get used to. Colin says my wheels are really good.

pies, oranges, and a new contributor

Hi, my name is Becca. I have known Inez and Elise for ten years and have been following their blog since its creation. I was asked to do a guest post for pi day, and seeing as I have been meaning to contribute something beautifully delicious for a while now, I immediately agreed.

I asked my brother if he was interested in helping me make pie for pi day, and since he is as much of a pie enthusiast as I am a math enthusiast, he agreed. I knew I wanted to make a pecan pie, but was thinking that since there were two of us, maybe one pie wouldn't be enough, so when he suggested we make pecan, pumpkin, blueberry, and rhubarb, who was I to disagree? So, we made pecan, chocolate pumpkin, blueberry, and strawberry-blueberry-rhubarb. And, even more impressive, we did this all without going grocery shopping (an advantage of using mom's kitchen - it is always well stocked with baking supplies).

Making four pies at once means I have to decide whether to arrange my post chronologically or one pie at a time. As of now, I have decided to write chronologically, so the confusion you feel while reading better represents the chaos of the kitchen. The pecan pie was my great grandma's recipe, which I remember from Christmases growing up. The chocolate pumpkin pie recipe was clipped from the newspaper, and I had never tried it before. The blueberry pie was my great aunt's recipe. And the rhu-berry pie recipe was sort of taken out of a cookbook, but modified a little.

Oh, and while all this pie baking was going on, we also made candied orange peel, because the parents just got a case of oranges. The first step was peeling the oranges, and not peeling them the way one would normally peel an orange, but actually taking a peeler to them.

The next step was to make the pie crusts. We used a pretty basic pie crust for the pecan and rhu-berry pies. The pumpkin pie recipe came with its own crust, which had cocoa powder in it. And I will include the blueberry pie crust here, just because.

Sweet Pie Crust

• 1 stick less 1/4 inch butter
• 1 cup flour
• 3 tablespoons powdered sugar

Mix together with your hands. Press evenly into a 9 inch pie pan, making sure the corners aren't too thick. Bake at 325 degrees, for about 20 minutes, until golden.

After making the crusts, we made the fillings. We did make a small substitution for the pecan pie - we used some molasses mixed with light syrup in place of dark syrup.

Sorry, the pumpkin pie filling is not represented in the pictures. Here is the recipe for the blueberry pie filling, to go with the crust recipe above.

Blueberry Glace Pie
Wash and drain 1 quart of blueberries. Put

• 1 cup of the blueberries
• 2/3 cup water

in a sauce pan, smash, and simmer for 3 minutes. Blend

• 1 cup sugar
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/3 cup water

and add to the boiling mixture. Boil for one minute, stirring constantly (until it starts to thicken). Let cool. If desired, spread 3 ounces of cream cheese over the bottom of the cooled, baked pie shell (we didn't have any cream cheese, so skipped this step). Spread a thin layer of the cooked mixture on the bottom and sides of the baked pie shell. Alternate layers of uncooked berries and cooked mixture. Refrigerate 2 hours (or just go straight to eating). Serve with whipped cream or ice cream. (You could also use strawberries or raspberries instead of blueberries.)

Not having to bake the blueberry pie meant that we could make more pies at once. We mixed the filling for the rhu-berry pie and the pecan pie, rolled out the crust for the pecan pie, filled it, and put it in the oven. Then started making the blueberry pie filling on the stove top, while the pecan pie was cooking. The pumpkin pie went into the oven next, because, although the filling was ready for the rhu-berry pie, we hadn't rolled out the crust yet. But before the pumpkin pie was done, we decided to throw the rhu-berry pie in the toaster oven. It was originally going to be a strawberry rhubarb pie, but after dumping the filling into the pie crust we decided it looked a little empty, and so threw some blueberries on top before adding the top crust. Then we assembled the blueberry pie, after the sauce had had a chance to cool (which took a little longer than necessary since we heated it back up again after the first time, trying to get it to thicken more). After the pumpkin pie came out of the oven we put the pecan pie back into the oven because we had forgotten to set the timer the first time and took it out a little too early.

Now we return to the candied orange peel, which we boiled with lots and lots of sugar, laid out on waxed paper, sprinkled with more sugar, and experimentally dipped some of in chocolate.

And to finish up this post, I will leave you with pictures of the completed pies.

[Inez] Pi/e Day

I made a Boston cream pie for Pi Day. Of course, it's not actually a pie, but it has "pie" in the name... that's good enough, right? Incidentally, does anyone know why Boston cream pie is called pie instead of cake?

In case you don't know, Boston cream pie is made by sandwiching pastry cream between two sponge cakes and topping it with chocolate ganache. It is holygoodness good. That's a new measurement I just made up. 


For normal math, the order of operations is generally referred to with the acronym PEMDAS (which, of course, stands for Please Evict Me Dear Algebra S....uh...Sychopath. Erm....) but for Boston cream pie on Pi Day you should remember FCG (filling - cake - ganache). It's like if FGC (Friends General Committee) were mildly dyslexic.


I'm going to give you the baby version recipes -- I didn't want to have a WHOLE BIG Boston cream pie, so I put my 6 inch pans to good use and made a half recipe. Incidentally, did you know that the volume of a cylinder 6" in diameter, if filled with 2" of cake batter, is almost exactly .45 the volume of a cylinder 9" in diameter filled with 2" of cake batter? In case you forgot, the equation for the volume of a cylinder includes Pi. How's that for some math, Pi Day? Anyway if you want to make a regular sized Boston cream pie, just double everything.


Pastry Cream
I didn't take any pictures of this process because a) it's really easy, and b) I was too busy stirring. Here's the recipe (make this first before anything else).

• 1/4 tbsp butter
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup cream
• 3 T sugar
• pinch salt
• 1 T cornstarch
• 3 small eggs (or maybe 2 really big eggs? the recipe called for 5 large eggs)
• 1/2-1 t vanilla

Heat the butter, milk and cream to just about to boil or so. Meanwhile mix the sugar, salt, cornstarch, and eggs in a bowl. When the milk etc is hot, add the egg mixture. Stir constantly on low heat until it thickens up. Put it in a bowl, mix in the vanilla, cover it, and put it in the fridge for a few hours. Make yourself a snack.

Sponge Cake

Have you ever made sponge cake before? I hadn't, and it is an absurdly counterintuitive way to make cake.

• 6 T flour
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1/8 t salt
• 1 T milk
• 2 T butter
• 1/4 t vanilla
• 3 small eggs (recipe called for 5 large eggs)
• 6 T sugar
• 1/8 t cream of tarter (or substitute with same amount of vinegar)

Preheat oven to 350F, grease your pans, and all that.

Whisk flour, baking powder and salt in a big bowl.

Heat milk and butter just until butter melts. Add vanilla. Cover and keep warm.

Separate eggs. Beat whites till foamy, then gradually add 3 T of the sugar and the cream of tartar or vinegar, and continue to beat eggs till soft, moist peaks form.

In a separate bowl, beat yolks with remaining sugar until very thick and a pale lemon color. Yes, this makes for a lot of separate bowls.

This is where I got nervous. Add the whites to the yolks but don't mix them. Sprinkle or sift the flour mixture over the eggs and mix them on low speed for 10 seconds (yes, I put a stall count on my cake batter). Make a well on one side of the batter (Why one side? I don't know. That's just what the recipe told me to do.) and pour the butter mixture into it. Fold gently until it's evenly mixed -- there should be no visible grease or oil.


Immediately pour the batter into your pre-prepared pans (you better have prepared them pre!). Bake until light brown, which took around 20 minutes or so. I was checking every few minutes after 15 or so, so I'm really not sure exactly how long it took.


Call some friends and invite them over to eat Boston cream pie. They won't say no.


Let the cake cool completely, let the custard chill and set some more, and eat some more food. Then make Ganache! I didn't halve the recipe, but I may have gone a bit overboard (see the picture at the top of the post...) and there was also leftover ganache.


Ganache

• 1/3 cup cream
• 1 T butter
• 4 oz chocolate, chopped (or about 2 cups of chocolate chips)

Bring cream and butter to a low simmer (stirring so it doesn't scald). Turn off the heat, mix in the chocolate. Don't be impatient like me, stick it in the fridge and let it cool off!

I got impatient and put the cream on the bottom cake.

I put almost all of it, which may have been going overboard. I was thinking, sponge cake is so light! But I forgot that ganache is really heavy. I would recommend going a little easy on the cream, and then you can spoon some more onto your slice.

Stephen and Ranajoy came over and between them, Colin, and me, we ate the whole damn thing in less than half an hour.

Review: it's a little intensive, but Boston cream pie is definitively DELICIOUS. Do it.

[Inez] Upcoming

Elise reminded me about this: Pi Day (3/14). Get ready.

Becca, I'm expecting a guest post from you.