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!