... And then I got pissed at a pie.

When I started writing this post, I had every intention of writing mostly about the highlights of my week and the latest good news, with just a couple of paragraphs about a pie failure from yesterday, but when I started ranting about the pie, there was no going back. So this post is mostly about a Pie that ruined an otherwise good week (and great day).... 

It was a busy week; yesterday was especially hectic. We started off with our usual Saturday morning routine -- of grocery shopping, grocery unpacking, and naptime. While the baby slept I set about making a peanut butter "cheesecake" from a recipe that a friend recommended. It called for a crust made with chocolate graham crackers and melted butter. Sounds yummy, but when I pressed it into the pie plate it wasn't really holding together. The next step was to melt chocolate chips and pour/spread it over the crust. Uhm, yeah... fail. The chocolate stuck to the crust so when I tried to spread it, the whole crust came up and it all started mixing into a chocolate/crust thing. I had to scrap the crust back out of the dish and mix up all the chocolate and grahams, then wipe down my plate and put the new chocolate/graham mix back in.

So that was really annoying.

Then I mixed up the other ingredients -- peanut butter, creme cheese, sweetened condensed milk, sugar. Made some whipped cream and folded it in. Sounds delicious, right? Licking the spoon gave me a serious sugar high (and corresponding, serious crash, later in the day). I put the decadent filling into the obnoxious crust. I made the mistake of trying to put a crisscross design of melted-chocolate over the top; I won't go into all the details, I'll just say that it was messy and difficult and did not look pretty when I was done.

The directions did not say to bake the "cheesecake" -- they just said it had to sit in the fridge for at least three hours. Which it did. Then it came with us to my in-laws house (where we had a big family dinner for nana, who just got back from an extended vacation, and Mike/Amy/Maddie who are in Oregon to spend a week with Amy's family). After dinner we got the pie/cake out of the fridge and cut into it.

Ugh.

The crust totally fell apart and the filling was like pudding. It was just a gooey mess. And I don't know what anyone else thought, but I thought it tasted yucky, too. I was -- and still am -- incredibly disappointed. Everyone told me it was fine, it was just like having a rich peanut butter pudding, but I think they were all just being nice. I thought it was disgusting. I'm also kinda ticked off because I spent $12 to get ingredients, and I feel like it was a total waste of my money AND all the two-ish hours I spent making it, then cleaning up. I really wanted to make a nice, tasty dessert as a special treat for my in-laws, and I failed. Grr.

I talked it through with Amy, who is brilliant when it comes to making "treats" like this. She said that cheesecakes is usually baked, and she hypothesized that part of the instructions were missing. So we decided that I should take the disaster home, make more crust to fill in what we ate, remove the remaining chocolate crisscross, spread the filling over the new crust, and bake it.

That was my plan. But we also had a wedding reception to attend, so we were only home long enough to change our clothes, then we went out again. By the time we were back and the baby was in bed, I was exhausted and didn't want to tango with Evil Pie. So I ignored it until this morning... when I remembered that I am teaching a Sunday School class all month! Thus I had to prepare a lesson and couldn't fuss with Evil Pie. Not that I really wanted to fix it -- I'm still mad at the dm'd thing! After church I poked it a bit and discovered that it has firmed up quite a lot in the last 24 hours. In fact, I think I could slice it and it might hold....

In any event, I don't really care anymore. It is gross, and I just want to take the remaining $6 worth of pie, throw it on the street, and spit on it.