Sticky Fingers

So, I've always wanted to enter a baking competition. Watching the Food Network religiously and the contests they air like I do, there's always the feeling that if only I had known about a particular one, I could have entered and won. It's a delusional thought. I'm decent at cooking and I have a few things I do particularly well. But the way I feel about winning these competitions is the same way J feels about the fact that he believes he could do open heart surgery if someone coached him through it. Or the way curling or synchronized swimming look easy.

Anyway.

It just so happens that I'm going to be at an event that has a baking competition and I found out about this a couple of months in advance, giving me plenty of time to prepare. I registered for the contest and started my research right away. There were a couple challenges that presented themselves straight away. The baking contest was for shoo fly pie, a dessert I'd never a) made, b) tasted, or c) heard of. But how hard could heart surgery really be?

Shoo fly pie, for the un-Pennsylvania Dutch among us, is basically a molasses pie with a crumb topping. The crumbs fuse with the filling to make a sort of cakey layer in the middle. It got it's name because it was the type of sweet pie that, when cooled on a windowsill, attracted flies and prompted the shooing of said flies. On the surface, the recipes I found were very similar to one another. Some have more or less molasses or sugar, or may use Crisco instead of butter, or whatever, but generally they all looked similar. I decided to start by using the recipe of last year's winner.

In 7th grade home ec class, we did an exercise in reading directions, where the teacher gave us a several pages of directions and told us to read them all carefully, then follow all of them; the first one to complete them all won some sort of prize. Of course the list was full of things like, "Do jumping jacks" and "stand on your chair," the last of which was, "Ignore all previous directions and sit quietly with hands folded." And of course the room was full of eager, prize-hungry kids climbing all over each other and balancing pencils on their noses. The moral being: read to the end of the recipe. Here's the winner's recipe:

Line a 9-inch pan with pastry. Combine golden barrel molasses, water and baking soda. Set aside. Sift together flour and sugar. Add the shortening to the flour mixture, work with a pastry blender to form crumbs for the top of the pie. Combine the flour mixture to the molasses mix. Stir. Pour into the unbaked pie shell. Top with remaining crumbs and bake at 375 degrees for 40-45 minutes.

If you're new to this, as I was, and was trying to make two recipes at once for the first time, you might do something stupid like, oh say, follow the directions verbatim. In particular: "Combine the flour mixture to the molasses mix." So when you get to the "Top with remaining crumbs," you are likely to go, "WHAT remaining crumbs??"

There are supposed to be crumbs on top of this mess.

My second attempt was better, but far from perfect. It mostly tasted like, uh, molasses and flour.

Which...is kinda gross. I don't know what I was expecting, but, hmmm. Luckily, a pro at eating shoo fly pies offered up some invaluable advice, which included trying to cut the molasses taste a bit. Innneresting. I thought that since the competition is sponsored by a molasses company, they might not appreciate recipes that CUT the molasses, but I thought it was worth a shot, if to only make the pie palatable. For ME. I also had the problem that the filling seemed to be too much for the pie shells. I had a dream (yes, really) about using a springform pan and decided to try it out.

The next series of recipes used the springform pan and were a little sweeter, with a little corn syrup cutting the molasses. I added such unheard of things like vanilla and cinnamon. The results were very pretty:

If a bit undercooked inside. I also made these little pie crust flies that I will decorate the pie with:

These are just rough prototypes, but: cute! I wish this was a shoo FLY competition. Anyway, while pretty, I don't think the shape of the springform pan was allowing the right kind of cooking. So I went back to the pie dish. Today I made a lovely tasting one. One that J actually ate a whole slice of in under 30 seconds! I figure this is a good thing, even if the "wet bottom" on the pie somehow slipped under the crust and made the pie sorta upside down.

Bah. I'll take any expert advice that might be floating around in cyberspace. Otherwise, just cross your fingers for me next Saturday.