Hello friends and PieLovers! Welcome to Pieathalon Ten. And welcome to my Not Quite A Hershey Pie! For new readers, Pieathalon is the time of year where food bloggers all over the world, lead by the lovely Yinzerella swap recipes for all sorts of weird and wonderful pies. This year, I was sent a recipe for Hershey Pie by Kari from The Nostalgic Cook. And I’m going to start right off by saying that this was a delight. It was so easy to cook, it looked absolutely gorgeous and tasted like a little piece of heaven.
Having said that, it was not without some problems. Notably, this was a very American pie. And as the name suggests, this pie called for Hershey Bars. Six Almond Hershey bars to be exact. So what, I hear half the world (The American half) exclaim. Well….Hershey’s is not the chocolate of choice in Australia. It’s not impossible to get Hershey bars but you either have to buy them off the net or go to a shop that sells American candy. And both of these places charge like wounded bulls. Luckily, Cadbury which is our chocolate of choice does a Milk Chocolate and Roast Almond Block which I was able to sub in for the Hershey’s. And if Hershey’s are hard to find….Graham Crackers? Impossible. I have never even seen these for sale here. So another substitution. Marie Biscuits for Graham Crackers this time.
I won’t even begin to enter the mathematical saga of if 6 Almond Hershey bars weigh x ounces and 2 Cadbury Family Size Blocks of Roast Almond weigh y grams, how much chocolate do I need for the pie? Or the trauma of how big is a large marshmallow?
Somehow, I managed to convert a SIX ingredient recipe into an international, mathematical, imperial to metrical brain scramble.
Having said that. The Cadbury / Hershey Pie was….wait for it…
It was so good.
First, it looked gorgeous!!! As I was mixing in the marshmallows, I noticed that they created a marble effect which I thought was quite beautiful. I kept some of those streaks in the finished pie. I also sprinkled some of the leftover crumb crust on top. Then the taste!!! It was like a little bit of heaven. Very rich, very sweet but utterly delicious!!! Personally, I found a tiny bit of salt sprinkled over the top helped to cut through the sweetness. The Fussiest Eater in the World liked it as is.
Hershey Pie – The Recipe
The Pieathletes
Here is a list of the other Pieathletes. Why not pop on over and see their creations? I wonder who got my Villa Pie?
(For early readers, I’ll update the links once each recipe is posted)
Jenny made Anthony Hopkins Beef and Hash Brown Pie. Goodness, Mr Hopkins is getting about this Pieathalon!
Thanks to Kari for the wonderful recipe and to the wonderful Yinzerella for organising! Have a great week…I’m off to eat some more of that yummy, yummy, pie!
Greetings Pie lovers! Welcome to a special midweek edition of Retro Food For Modern Foods. Today we are celebrating that best of best days of the year – Pieathalon Day. This is the day, where lead by the lovely Yinzerella, bloggers worldwide swap and cook vintage pie recipes.
This year I got a recipe for Lime Pie with Creme de Menthe sent to me by Dr Bobb. Now, call me biased but how pretty are these? I made lots of little pies because I could not find a large already baked pie crust and at the time I made these I was suffering from double ear infections and a bad back so I was not really up for shopping about. The one shop I went to had no large pie crusts so I bought two packs of medium. I’m kind of glad. I think the little pies look adorable.
Lime Pie with Creme de Menthe?
To be honest, though, I was not initially enamoured with the recipe. Lime yes! It was the Creme de Menthe I was struggling with. I have never really tasted Creme de Menthe, all I knew about it was that it was a mint-flavoured liqueur that Poirot sometimes sips. Hmm…I wonder if that is why Yinzerella sent it to me! I have a love/hate relationship with mint-flavoured things. I hate mint tea and mint choc chip ice cream but I love a mint slice biscuit and I love the combo of mint and lime in a mojito.
Looking at the bottle of Creme de Menthe though I couldn’t help feeling I was going to be flavouring my pies with something that looked suspiciously like the mouthwash I use!
I had to keep reminding myself Mojito, not Listerine!
Mojito! Mojito…And given that I always like to have a song to celebrate Pieathalon, I was singing that “Mojito, mojito” to the tune of the bit in Despacito that goes “Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito”.
(How many of you are not humming despacito now?
However the real sticking point was not the Creme de Menthe but came when I was half way through making the recipe. At the exact point when I realised that the original recipe contained egg yolks that were not going to be cooked.
Hard no for me on the raw yolks.
Not the least of which was that I now had 12 little pies. These were going to last us for days. And if the idea of fresh raw yolks was bad, the idea of 4 day old raw yolks was putrid. Plus the mixture was quite runny. I was sure if I left it uncooked, we would have soggy bottoms in no time. And as anyone who watches the Great British Bake Off will know, no one likes a soggy bottom!
So, I popped my little pies into the oven for about 15 minutes.
Despite my misgivings, these pies were delicious!
Lime Pie with Creme De Menthe – The Recipe
Doctor Bobb, I raise my glass to you and your recipe!
Why not check out what Dr Bobb and all the other pieathletes made per the links below:
(please note some of the links may not be live at the time of posting. I will update as they become live).
Hello friends and pie eaters!!! Welcome to Pieathalon 7 – that very special time of year when bloggers from all over the world get together and celebrate the weird and wonderful world of vintage pies. And oh boy did it get weird this year! Surly over from at Vintage Recipe Cards sent me a hybrid concoction which much like my detested chocolate cheesecake takes two things that separately are wonderful and combines them into a Franken-monster Chicken Salad Pie!
Are you ready, are you ready for this? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Glorious is it not?
Before we even get to the eating of it, let me tell you that Chicken Salad Pie was an absolute BASTARD of a thing to make! Even before that though, let’s start with possibly the only positive to come out of this which is the perfect late ’60’s styling of the original recipe! Perfection! I want that leaf plate so, so much. And those gold glasses!
So, you’ll notice that my pies are a lot more round that those in the recipe. Let me tell you why.
Chicken Salad Pie: Hours 1-3
I finished work at around 6 and started cooking. Given that I now mostly work from the dining table, I probably started making the Chicken Salad Pie at around…6:01. Put the chicken on to poach. Start cutting the pastry into the right size of rounds. Oh, yeah, did I mention I was doing this on the Tuesday night before we posted today?
6:30: Everything on track. The chicken was poached and was cooling. The pastry had been blind-baked and was also cooling.
6:45 The broth, salad dressing, onion, lemon juice and salt were in the bowl waiting for the pimentos. Oh. That’s right. We don’t have pimentos here. So, in order to get pimentos, I bought a jar of stuffed olives and picked them out of the olives using a kitchen skewer.
How long does it take to pick out a peck of pickled pimentos?
Too damn long.
Especially if you eat half the olives you are meant to be picking.
7:15: Pimentos were picked. Gelatine was added. Mixture was beaten and left to chill.
8:15: Has the mixture thickened? I don’t think it’s thickened. Better give it another half hour.
8:45: The mixture has definitely not thickened.
8:50: Research what do to if gelatine does not set.
Chicken Salad Pie: Hours 3-6
9:00. Tip the mixture into a saucepan and heat it. Add more gelatin.
9:20: Place mixture back into the fridge. Wonder why you chose this week of all weeks to be alcohol-free.
9:45: Mixture shows no sign of thickening. But it was warm so it will probably take longer right?
10:15 Still not thickening. Realise you have not had dinner. Eat some olives.
10:45 It’s like water. Pour runny gelatine back into the saucepan.
11:15 Add more gelatine to the rewarmed mixture. Have a glass of wine. This is not the week to quit drinking.
11:30 Put the mixture back into the fridge. Curse the non-specificity of vintage recipes. How much gelatine was in an envelope of gelatine in 1968? And how does that translate to spoonfuls which is how I am measuring mine. Wonder why you leave everything to the last minute. Vow to change. Eat more olives.
Midnight: The mixture is thickening!!!! REEEEE-SULT! Add the chicken and celery
12:15: Still thickening but still too runny to pour into the pie shells. Because as they keep telling you on The Great British Bake-off, no one likes a soggy bottom! Decide to pour the mixture into teacups, allow it to set inside them and turn them out the following day….later that same day.
CHICKEN SALAD PIE – THE VERDICT
Cutting into the chicken salad pie was reminiscent of cutting into that jellied loaf style of dog food which was a real hurdle to overcome when tasting it. I did have a tiny bit and it wasn’t….awful. It tasted and smelled mostly of the dressing. But the association with dogfood was enough to prevent me from eating any more.
So in summary, no sleep, no dinner and a pie that looked like Pedigree Chum. It was certainly no winner, winner chicken dinner. I can’t even feed it to the dogs, who would love it due to the onions! This one, sadly, is going straight into the trash.
Pieathalon 7
Thanks as ever to Yinzerella for organising Pieathalon 7! You’re the best!
Thanks / Curses to Surly for the recipe. It was very fun to make despite it taking forever and being the closest thing to dogfood I have ever eaten.
I really hope Wendy from A Day In The Life on The Farm fared better with my recipe for Cherry Blossom Pie!
To see how Wendy went and to check out all the other pies, please click on the links below. If they are not all up at the time of posting, I will update during the course of the day.
Happy Pieathalon People of the internet! Yep, it’s that special time of year when a group of bloggers get together and bake the good, the bad and the ugly of vintage pies! It’s also my birthday week so it’s double the celebrations for me! Pie and champagne! Life, my friends, is good indeed!😍
Let’s get down to it, shall we?
The Pie
Pie choice day is always exciting. What will that email from Yinzerella reveal? There is always a slight worry in the excitement – I am happy to have an odd pie – but not too odd. One of my favourite parts of Pieathalon is that I get to eat a pie so I always give a little silent prayer. “Please do not let this contain anything disgusting like offal or beetroot. Or sugary onions.” Speaking of the sugary onions, my recipe came from The Nostalgic Cook who sent Jenny the Sweet Onion Pie recipe last year!
Luckily the Gods, (and Kari and Yinzerella) smiled down on me. The pie I received was a gorgeous sounding Honey Cream Cheese Pie from Sunset’s New Kitchen Cabinet Cookbook from 1938. It is described as a “not-quite-so rich version of the very rich German Cheesecake. This Honey Cream Cheese Pie will be welcomed by everyone”. It was more than welcomed by me. I had most of the ingredients which is important when you are leaving the country for a month! I did not want to buy things only to have to throw away any leftovers because we were going away!
This book looks great. I love the little cartoony insets. The recipe page also had a v cute cartoon for a less than appealing sounding carrot mould.
Speaking of which…remember a few Pieathalons ago, when I made the Lime Jello Pie? I totally forgot that I had moved it to the fridge in the garage so the housesitters could use the main fridge. When I opened the garage fridge about a week after we got home, it was like I had just put it in there. It had not changed one iota in the month it had been in there.
Terrifying!!!!!
The Song
Every year I get a song stuck in my head at Pieathalon time. For my first Pieathalon it was Waterloo by Abba. For the lime jello pie I went a bit hair-metal and subbed in the words “Lime Jello Pie” into “Sweet Cherry Pie”
There were two contenders this year. The first was, of course “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” by the Four Tops. But nah, too obvious. The song that stuck was “Honey Child, what can I do?” by The Ballad of The Broken Seas. Which became Honey Pie what can I do? Which then morphed into….no, we’ll get to that…
Ch…ch…changes
The recipe for the pie says that it is big! Enough for 8 which was way too big given our impending departure. There were three eggs in the original recipe and everything else was easily divisible by three so I decided to make a third of the original recipe. And also that small pies were going to be easier to distribute out if we didn’t eat them all. It might be weird to give the neighbours who are picking up our mail a half-eaten pie. But I think, perfectly acceptable to give them a few freshly baked tartlets as a pre-emptive thank you.
The Bake aka Honey Pie what did I do?
I baked my pies on Saturday afternoon where there was a LOT happening. We were still booking some accommodation so there was stuff happening on the internet, there were phone calls, there was washing and packing and I don’t know just a lot of things going on. I was also obsessing about the nutmeg. Personally, I don’t like it so was trying to decide if I used it on all of the pies, or none or some.
But the making of the pies went perfectly. There was enough mixture for the 6 small pies and some leftover. I had a little taste of the raw filling, it was really good!!! I nutmegged three of the six tarts, popped them in the oven and went to hang out the washing.
When I came back inside I noticed a jug of milk on the bench. And realised that I had totally left the milk out of the recipe!!!!
It was too late to do anything about it. I briefly contemplated pulling the pies out of the oven, scraping out the filling, adding the milk and refilling them but they were already a little bit too set for that.
So, there was nothing to do but to sit and wait to see how these milkless tarts would turn out.
My song quickly became “Honey pies what did I do?”
The Verdict
The honey cream cheese pies looked so gorgeous when they came out of the oven, gorgeous golden domes. The smell of the baking was divine. And they tasted delicious!
We had one each while they were still warm from the oven and they were like a cross between a cheesecake and a Portuguese tart. So tasty.
I don’t know what the milk would have done to these but they were so good without it that I will not add it in when I make these again, which I will definitely do!
We had no leftovers to give neighbours or anyone else! I ate the last one the following night as we waited for the Uber to take us to the airport. With a little glass of sparkling wine, it was the perfect end to Pieathalon 2019 and the start of the holiday!
Thanks as ever to the amazing Yinzerella who organises this whole shebang each year!
You can find her Pieathalon recipe over at Dinner is Served 1972 and check out all the other pieathletes per the links below. Why not start with Kelly over at the Velveteen Lounge who got my recipe for Angel Pie?
Here is the full list of this year’s participants. Some of the links will not be working yet, I will update later today as people post their recipes!
It will come as no surprise to you, wise people of the internet that this, in all it’s earthy glory, is a potato:
And this, is a can of beans.
They don’t call me Captain Obvious for nothing!
What is probably not so obvious is that you can turn these into this:
That’s right, lemon meringue pie made from spuds and beans.
How?
Well, it’s Pieathalon – the foodie equivalent of Mouseketeer Surprise Day; anything can happen and it usually does!
Starting with a brand new logo (thanks Greg, it looks super!)
Pieathalon is that time of year when bloggers from all over the world swap recipes and rejoice in the kooky baked goods of yesterday. The full list of participants and what they made is at the bottom of the post. Why not go visit them all? Maybe start with Battenberg Belle who is making my pie of choice, Fatty Arbuckle’s Delight, then pop over to Ruth at Mid Century Menu who sent me lemon potato pie!
Lemon Potato Pie – The Pie
The recipe for Lemon Potato Pie comes from 250 Superb Pies and Pastries, a book from 1941. The use of the humble spud instead of the more luxurious ingredient of butter to create lemon curd had a feel of wartime austerity about it. Butter was rationed right? Otherwise….why? No, seriously, WHY?
Let’s not delve too deeply into the minds of 1941 and get stuck right in to the pie. Starting with some grated potato.This was then parboiled for a spell and quickly became a kind of gloopy liquid.
After the rest of the ingredients were added and it cooked some more, the potato broke down even further. However, at the end of the cooking there were still some small flakes of potato which were odd and a bit off putting when you tasted the….sludge. So, even though this was not in the recipe I blended the lemon mixture to make it smooth. Bear, in mind I have the fussiest eater in the world as my chief taste tester!
Lemon Potato Pie – The Meringue
So, then to the meringue. And here disaster struck. I had put the separated whites into a bowl and left them on the far side of the kitchen bench while I made the filling. When it came time to make the meringue I looked around to where I had left the egg whites and they had vanished.
“Did you take my egg whites?” I asked The Fussiest Eater in The World.
“I gave them to the dogs. I thought that’s what you left them for”.
We had no more eggs. And we had been to a rather boozy lunch that day so there was no option of getting into the car to go buy more eggs.
“Crap…guess, I’ll have to finish it tomorrow”.
A bit later, I was making our dinner which was the Argentine Beef Stew from The A-Z of Cooking (1971). I will definitely blog about that one soon, it was DELICIOUS and I remembered something about making meringues from bean water. A quick visit to Google confirmed that you could make meringue from the water that surrounds tinned chickpeas or white beans. Why not give it a whirl? It’s in the same spirit of “make do and mend” as the potato based filling.
I drained the can of beans, the beans went into the stew and the bean water went into the mixer.
I was incredibly surprised to see that it meringued up a treat!
Ooops! I’d over filled my pie!
In homage to Ruth, I thought I would let the Fussiest Eater in The World have the final say on the Lemon Potato Pie.
Lemon Potato Pie: The Verdict
Mixed.
So, what do you think?
“The filling is gorgeous. It’s really delicious”.
And the meringue?
“Tastes like the worst marshmallow in the world”.
Well done cooks of 1941! And thanks Ruth for a super recipe! Your lemon potato pie is delicious!
Sadly, vegans and egg intolerants, the aqua fava meringue was not. It was much more marshmallow-y than meringue-y. It was very gooey and a bit stringy – think mozzarella cheese on a pizza.
Here is the recipe for the pie:
Given the bean meringue was a failure, here is the proper recipe for the meringue from Ruth.
“The recipe for Meringue 1 is 2 egg whites, 4 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla. Beat eggs until frothy, add sugar gradually, and continue beating until stiff. Add flavoring. Pile on pie and bake in 325 degree oven for 15-18 minutes”
Pieathalon 3 – The Bloggers
Here is the full list of the wonderful crazy people who participated in Pieathalon this year. I’m heading off to see their creations! Why not join me?
