Happy Pi Day! Colonial Innkeeper's Pie

I never plan ahead properly, so every year for Pi Day I find myself looking for something easy that I can put together quickly. But those aren't the kind of pies I usually want to eat. 

I've had this recipe for "Funny Cake Pie" bookmarked for some time. It's an odd recipe, from an odd (now defunct) blog. I'll let that blogger explain...

This month’s pie is a traditional pie of the Pennsylvania Dutch.  Supposedly the pie, like the community of settlers from which it comes, is German in ancestry, but I am a bit skeptical of this claim, since I’ve never run across anything like this in German bakeries.  In fact, pies in general are little known by traditional German bakers.... The name “Funny Cake Pie” is telling in several ways. First of all,  the pie itself is cake-like, much like a shoo-fly pie, or a lemon sponge pie, or a Montgomery pie.  There is a cakey layer component to the filling.  The “funny” bit refers to the way the chocolate layer goes on top when you make the filling but it comes out of the oven with the chocolate layer mysteriously on the bottom layer!

Old recipes were written very differently from how they are now with far fewer directions that are often quite vague, so I'm usually hesitant to try them.  I think this blogger actually made the pies on her blog, but she doesn't have a clue how to write a recipe.  I've rewritten it below and tweaked the recipe a bit in order to, I think, give better flavor.  Here's what I used:

9" unbaked pie crust

Vanilla mixture:
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup salted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 beaten egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup milk

Sift together the flour and baking powder; set aside. In a medium-sized bowl, cream together butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the egg and beat until smooth. Add the vanilla and almond extracts and beat until well mixed. Beat in the milk alternately with flour mixture until smooth; set aside.

Chocolate mixture:
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon espresso powder (optional)
1/8 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons water
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

In a small bowl, stir together the cocoa powder, sugar, espresso powder, and salt. Add the water a little at a time and blend to combine. Add the vanilla and stir to mix well. Pour into an unbaked pie shell. Over this carefully pour the vanilla mixture. (It’s okay if the chocolate oozes up around the outside edge---it gives a nice crusty edge on the finished product.) Bake in a 350 degree oven for 35-45 minutes or until toothpick in the center comes out clean. Allow to cool before slicing.

This didn't turn out quite as she described. I'm not sure if that's because she made a mistake in posting the recipe, or if the recipe was simply bad to start with. (When I was a little girl, my mom and I made a shoofly pie from a recipe in the back of a book I'd read. It was a disaster. We even made it a second time---bless my mom's heart--- to see if we'd made a mistake the first time and got the same results: a watery molasses mixture that never even began to set up. Wish I could find that recipe now to take a look at it.  Apparently it's supposed to have a "cakey" part as well.) The chocolate batter was watery and the vanilla batter very thick, so yes, the chocolate mixture did ooze a bit, but it came out of the oven exactly as it went in, just no longer raw. Nothing mysteriously changed places or did anything else unusual, other than it took at least 10 minutes longer to bake than instructed. At least it did set up. I was worried I would end up with another shoofly disaster.

I've never heard of Montgomery pie, so I looked it up and I found that this recipe is very similar, but substitutes the molasses flavor for chocolate.  The chocolate option seems to be called Colonial Innkeeper's pie.  I also noticed that one person baked her pie for 45 minutes at 375 and it still was underbaked.  (Most significantly, she used an egg in each part.  I don't actually know what made the chocolate part in this set.) 

Conclusion:   My co-workers seemed to like this but I didn’t care for it. It tasted commercial, partially because of the poor quality cocoa and partially because it was too sweet. (Other recipes use ¼ cup less sugar, I think.) The texture was gummy even though it was baked, and the flavor was sort of bland. And I don’t know why you’d bake a cake in a pie anyway. But it was a fun experiment.

Original recipe: Funny Cake Pie via Pie of the Month Club 

Another recipe to try:  Colonial Innkeeper's Pie via allrecipes

Breakfast cookie

Monday morning meeting tomorrow, so I made snacks.  These are supposed to be healthy cookies, suitable for breakfast, fortified with lots of granola-y stuff.

The author of this recipe is a food scientist, but that doesn't mean she's a good baker, or a good blogger.  She didn't say how many this made, or even how big they're supposed to be. (What's a 1.5-ounce ice cream scoop??)  I suppose I should have checked her photos again before making them, but it still didn't help that I didn't have the scoop.  And she cheated by putting her almonds on top before baking instead of mixing them in, making the cookies look a lot chunkier than they are.

Hers

I mostly used the original recipe directly and made one dozen cookies, with just a few change ups.  Here's what I used:

1 cup all purpose flour

¼ cup whole wheat flour

¾ cup old-fashioned large flake rolled oats

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature

¾ cup packed light brown sugar

1 tablespoon molasses

2 ½ tablespoons golden honey

zest of ½ orange (optional)

1 large egg, room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons flax seeds

1/2 cup whole almonds or walnuts, toasted

1/3 cup sunflower seeds, toasted

(1/4 cup golden raisins)

1/4 cup dried cranberries

Preheat your oven to 350F.  Lightly grease two baking sheets and set aside.  In a medium bowl, whisk together the first eight (dry) ingredients.  In a large bowl, beat together on high speed butter, sugar, honey, and orange zest until smooth and creamy, about 1 minute.  Beat in egg, vanilla, and flax seeds until smooth. Add flour mixture all at once to the butter mixture and beat on low speed until it is mostly combined, about 10 to 15 seconds.  Use a rubber spatula to fold in nuts, seeds, and fruit all at once. Use a tablespoon (or a 1½-ounce ice cream scoop) to drop large, plum-sized scoops of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them 2 inches apart.  Flatten each cookie slightly; bake until golden brown around edges, about *10-12 minutes. Let cool on the pan for about 1 minute before transferring them to a wire rack to cool.

Well these weren't quite what I had in mind. I was picturing something far more chunky and less dessert-like. These were WAY too sweet for a breakfast cookie, and not nearly chunky enough. They need more whole wheat flour, about ½ cup less sugar and at least half again as many nuts and maybe sunflower seeds, if not double. (I'd play around with the balance between sugar, honey, and raisins.) I’d probably leave out the raisins entirely and replace with more cranberries.  (I couldn't even taste the cranberries.)  At one time her recipe said it made 16 cookies; I made one dozen and had to bake them about an extra 5 minutes.

Conclusion:  Meh.  I probably wouldn't make these again unless I needed something quick and easy to bring to another meeting.  I wish I'd thought of it sooner, but coffee flour might have been a good addition.

Recipe:  The Breakfast Club Cookie via Scientifically Sweet