New year, new recipes.
Day 4
Vegan Custard Pie. Or Epic Failure. Both adequately describe my baking endeavors today.
This was how it started when I put it in the oven.
But it looks so good, you say. Yeah, I thought so too. I thought this was a good start.
I may have been watching too many episodes of Great British Bake Off. I’ve always enjoyed baking, but I’m not particularly great at it. Mostly, because I like to experiment with recipes. If I don’t have all the ingredients, I try to find substitutions in my kitchen. And frequently, I try to reduce the fat and the sugar in any recipe - because I’ve found that sometimes you can’t really tell that I’ve done that. And then sometimes, you can totally tell - and it’s a failure. But this year, I’m working on enjoying and running after failure. I find that I’ve gotten quite comfortable not taking risks. And it’s because I’m afraid of failure. So I’m looking to run after failure...and I did. Victory?
Here's where I started. I made a vegan pie crust. Not that hard, I’ve done it before. It just consists of flour, coconut oil and cold water. Combine, then let rest. Then roll out and put into a pie pan. Looks decent, right? I mean, it looks edible, at least.
Then I attempted the custard. Truthfully, I was just going to make a lactose free custard that I had made before. Made with almond milk, it’s one of the best custards I’ve tasted.
We didn’t have eggs, but we did have ...Flax Meal. So I made Flax eggs
If you don’t know what that is, you can google it.
I combined this with the rest of the ingredients and put it into the pie shell to bake.
And this is what happened.
If you can't really tell, the pie crust came up through the custard, and the custard did not set. It was like a wheat germ soup. Plus, the pie filling is grey. Grey-brown. I'm not sure the last time someone wanted to eat a grey-brown dessert.
Ah well.
Regardless, I’m proud of what I did today. I tried something different.
And truthfully, it didn’t taste awful. It sort of just reminded me of Cream of Wheat cereal - which I happen to like.
Oh!
There was one fail that was not so great, and made this more like a Pyrrhic victory... that's a burn on my arm from the oven. At least now I'll have a permanent memory of this day.
Victory!