Saturday was the Mr’s birthday!  He had a great birthday with gifts from the kids and me.  It’s tax season, so he had to work (boo) but only half a day (yay!).  My goal was to do something very special for him for his birthday:

recreate his Grandmother’s chocolate pie.

To recreate his late Grandmother’s chocolate pie, made every year for him for as long as he can remember, is no small feat.  I felt pretty much doomed from the start.  For the record, I’ve never made a pie before.  Did you see that?

I have never made a pie before.

So I found two recipes: Taste of Home Grandma’s Chocolate Meringue Pie and Homesick Texan Grandma’s Chocolate Pie.  I am pretty pleased at how the pies got started:

Now, it’s not like I made the pie crust (refrigerated!) but I did flute the edge (YAY!).  Let’s save that for next month.  I followed directions to poke holes in the crust so it didn’t bubble up but it didn’t quite work out:

Now, I wasn’t going to let this deter me.  No one is going to see this part of the crust anyway, right?  Right.  So fillings were made and then I needed to make the meringue.  I was nerdy proud of myself that I was able to do this by hand:

So pretty–I was sure I was on a roll:

And then it happened:  leakage.

The second one came out beautifully!  Can you see the heart?

And then, THIS FUCKING BULLSHIT:

The Mr. said not to worry about the leakage and he tried the Taste of Home pie and declared it to be 80% right!  That was a fantastic grade in my opinion.  Then he requested a spaghetti dinner and I asked him to taste the other pie too, even though he was full.  He really didn’t want to, but he begrudingly took a bite of the Homesick Texan pie.  His face LIT UP and he declared it to be 98% his Grandmother’s pie.  I wanted to cry.  He ate a whole other piece of the good pie and nearly made himself sick.  In a good way, of course.

I think I’ve solved the leakage problem–neither of the recipes said to cool the pie before putting the meringue on.  I sealed them well, but I don’t know anything about anything, least of all pie things, so I didn’t know better.  Science tells me that if you put something cold on something hot, the cold thing will melt, but I followed the recipes to the letter.  Next time, I’ll let them cool before meringue-ing them.

Also, because I was afraid that all the pies were going to taste akin to a mud pie, I made a chocolate cake, too:

Overall, I’m happy with the results even though there is room for improvement.  I can’t wait to try it again!