Cream buns: or Baking choux with Fanny Cradock

Even when I'm evading the holiday, Christmas always makes me want to make Fanny Cradock recipes. We have made every species in her Christmas bird episode (see the chicken here, the duck here, and the turkey here). And today, we make the most dreamy way to make luxurious desserts while barely spending any grocery money! If you think this is an exaggeration, this is literally everything we are using for today's recipe. (Well, everything except the ingredients for the filling and icing at any rate.)

Now that a dishwasher has entered my life, I can measure out ingredients without handwashing a pile of tiny bowls.

Today, we turn to her episode on petits fours to make this!

Choux Buns 2 oz butter* 4½ oz water (½ cup plus 1 tbsp) 2½ oz self-rising flour† (½ cup plus 2 tbsp) 2 eggs If you have a pot that you can use an electric mixer in without scratching it, use it. Melt the butter in the water in a small pot over medium heat, then turn up the burner until it boils very hard. Dump in the flour all at once, keeping the burner at high heat. When the boiling water starts to bubble right over the flour (this should only take a few seconds), remove from heat and beat hard until smooth. Switch to a hand mixer if it won't scratch your pot. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating the mixture very hard until completely smooth after each one. Put the dough in a piping bag with a wide tip (one-half to one inch). Leave it out at room temperature until it cools completely. If you don't, you will have hot goo in the middle of your buns. When the choux paste is cold, lightly grease a cookie sheet. Move an oven rack to the top of the oven and heat it to 450° (yes really). Pipe the dough out into the shapes you desire, leaving plenty of room for expansion. Use a knife dipped in cold water to cut the dough off of the piping bag, re-dipping it in cold water whenever the dough sticks to it. You can also use the knife to reshape any buns don't come out like you wanted. Bake until darkly colored, which can be about 12 minutes if you piped out little ones or even thirty minutes if you made big ones. For the filling, make any custard recipe you like. You can fold whipped cream into it if desired. When the custard and the buns are cooled, cut the buns open and fill them. It'll be easier to make tops stay on after filling them if you leave a little hinge instead of cutting them all the way off. To ice the buns, mix powdered sugar, a tiny pinch of salt, vanilla, food coloring, and enough water to barely make it thin enough to slowly pour out. You want a very thick glaze. Spoon it over the buns. *Apparently unsalted butter is an American-only thing, so I added a pinch of salt to make up for its absence. †Don't blame me for the added baking powder, Fanny Cradock wrote the recipe. Source: Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas: Petits Fours, BBC, 1975

Today, we are making one of the sacred recipes of French cooking canon: choux paste (or choux pastry if you want to sound proper with two rolled R's). As with all French recipes made by anyone outside of France, there are people who swear that this is a super-ultra-rare-special technique and don't you dare change it or else Escoffier and Careme will come from the grave and swat you. If you delve deep into the world of people who unironically use the word "gastronomy," you will find people can't even give the recipe entirely in English (using French names for the various steps of it is just so much more authentic). Google Translate even refuses to give an English translation of the word "choux" when you're looking up baking terms.

Oh. Choux is the French word for choux. Thank you, robotranslators.

 

But if you took French in school and remember the grocery store vocabulary words, you will know that "choux" means cabbages, and therefore "pâte à choux" means "cabbage paste." Apparently if you bake it in balls, they kind of look like cabbages after expanding in the oven. But "cabbage pastry" just doesn't have the je ne sais quoi that "choux pastry" does. Also, people who try to add class to their cooking snobbery by dropping French words into their sentences like freshly-milled pepper just sound like they are saying "pat a shoe" anyway.

 

On a related note, at some point after Miss Leslie gave recipes for "puff paste," "the best plain paste," and suchlike in the bestselling American cookbooks of the 1830s, we all decided that we were making pastry instead of paste.  It is acceptable to make paste if it's in other languages (pasta, pâte, etc). But if you line a pie pan with paste in English you will immediately get supercilious glares.

Like Fanny Cradock says, just dump all the flour in and wait until the boiling water seethes over it.

 

Because it's a Very Traditional French Recipe, I saw a lot articles that made choux paste seem like a super-advanced technique that requires a thermometer, several hours sweating over a hot stove, and years of practice to get right. But if you ignore the cultural heft and look at the recipe, anyone who can make white gravy can make choux paste. The only thing that felt weird to me was using water instead of butter. I've never thought about it, but it seems that nearly every baked dessert recipe uses milk instead (cue the long list of exceptions I totally should have named).

After a really hard beating with a spoon to bash out the flour lumps, we have what's basically a unpourably thick white gravy. It smelled exactly like an extra-buttery pot of mashed potatoes.

At this point, Fanny Cradock tells us that we would discard the spoon if we're clever and get out an electric mixer. And while I may be clever(ish), I also don't have pots that can withstand an electric mixer without getting ruinously gouged. I was afraid the egg would immediately scramble on contact with the hot paste, but dumped the egg in anyway. Fanny Cradock didn't have any problems with curdled eggs, and she did this on TV. Sure enough, instead of cooked egg lumps, we got what Fanny Cradock called "the globule stage." Fanny Cradock really does make this recipe sound enticing as she mutters about "nasty little lumps" while wielding an electric mixer that scrapes and grinds into the pot.

It's a lot harder to get everything beaten smooth when you're using a spoon instead of an electric mixer. You really do need to beat the globules very hard before everything finally mixes together. Fanny Cradock was right when she said to just think of someone you never liked but you're too well-bred to say anything so you take it out on your cooking. But if you have stainless steel pots, I definitely recommend using one and getting out the mixer. Even if you have to handwash dishes including mixer beaters, you'll still be glad you did.

After all this hard beating, we've basically made a batch of gravy that you could sculpt like modeling clay. I don't get why people babble on about choux paste like it's a maddeningly difficult French recipe. The only hard part was the excessive arm workout. And now, as Fanny Cradock tells us, we need to let it get absolutely cold. And so, I put it into my piping bag and waited. This stuff held heat unexpectedly well. Every time I thought it was cold, I would squish it and find that some of it was still warm in the middle.

The last time I made choux paste, it was in cooking class. Since we had to make everything in a short time, I did not have time to let it get cold. Nor did the official recipe in the cooking textbook tell me that I should. As a result, all of my choux balls were full of the "surplus goo" that so infuriated Fanny. We ended up frantically picking out all the hot dough in the middle before filling them with whatever the stuffing was that time. That dough browned on the outside, but it never baked. It just got hot instead. At the end of class, one of my classmates tried dropping some of the extra dough in a hot frying pan where it turned into a big splat of hot goo with a browned exterior. The danged stuff absolutely refused to turn into baked bread no matter how much heat we put on it. But since I have no end-of-class deadline this evening, I just left this out on the countertop and until it was as cold as the drafts blowing in through the walls.

Fanny Cradock makes these three-step shaped buns, though a quick image search shows that people these days make ball-shaped ones instead. You can see how badly I messed up the last one when I was trying to get a bun's worth of a dough out of a now-empty bag.

Fanny Cradock tells us we may not believe her when she says to bake these at gas mark 8 on the top oven rack. I looked up what gas marks are, and apparently gas mark 8 is around 450 degrees. Indeed, I did not believe Fanny Cradock. But even watching her online with about forty years between her broadcast and you, it's hard to argue with her glare. And so, I heated the oven to the hottest temperature since the pita bread. I then spent the entire time these baked anxiously hoping the bottoms of these things wouldn't turn to charcoal. I can live with baked failures, but I hate when they leave a smell that I have to live with for the next week. As a result, I took these out a bit earlier than Fanny Cradock might have. It's easy to admire the lovely golden color, but I was instead terrified that these things were full of hot goo.

I would say that you should double this recipe if you're making these for a lot of people, but these things expand a lot in the oven. So instead, just make them a lot smaller than you think, and this seemingly-small amount of choux paste will be plenty. Have a look:

They do look kind of like little cabbages, don't they? Or at least, they would if I had made balls instead of little three-tiered buns. Here is a better view of just how much bigger they got. These things didn't rise in the oven, they inflated.

The biggest surprise lay underneath these puffed-up creations. Despite spending nearly twenty minutes in an oven hotter than I ever bake at, they were not even close to burnt on the bottom.

We left these until they cooled off, and then cut them open to reveal...

Perfect hollow things ready to receive whatever we want to stuff in them! In full disclosure, some of them didn't have that perfect hollow space in the middle. We had to press the inside of these open with a fingertip. But we weren't picking any unbaked goo out of these, nor were we cutting anything out of them. We merely pushed the little layers of perfectly goo-free bread to the sides. 

As for the custard, Fanny Cradock has a recipe for it and actually gives the amounts on camera. This is a rare departure from her usual way of telling us that "the recipe's in the booklet." However, her recipe uses egg yolks. I wasn't about to throw out egg whites, so I just made the recipe for pecan pie with extra vanilla and without pecans. 

We are then directed to fold in whipped cream. I didn't think to buy a carton of cream, but one of the people in the house has taken to keeping a can of the stuff on hand for medicinal ice cream.

Don't think of it as Redi Whip. Think of it as crème fouettée en boîte.

Fanny Cradock cuts her cream buns open very low, leaving a lot of unfilled space on the top of each one. I did the opposite, making these more like custard mugs with edible lids. Also, these things are a lot more fragile than they look on Fanny Cradock's show. She makes it look like you just saw them open, but in reality you have to be very careful with the knife lest they squish.

I thought this filling was very runny, but so was the custard she used on TV. And apparently that's just like what we could get in France if we traveled. On a related note, I think perhaps our American fascination with France is so severe because so few of us go there. France probably has a lot less of a mystique when you can just cross the English channel in an afternoon. Maybe American culinary snobs wouldn't try so hard to use French words whenever possible if you could just go to France for a weekend instead of hearing secondhand myths about their exquisite cooking--- er, cuisine. 

Back to filling our buns with custard, I am very happy that I made just the right amount. All of the cream buns got happily filled, and the bowl got nearly emptied. I didn't run short, nor did I have a lot of unused extra. It felt almost as satisfying as when your cupcake batter exactly fills your cupcake pan.

I thought about making cinnamon icing for these but decided to keep it simple. So these just got powdered sugar and water- with a pinch of salt and a splash of vanilla for flavor. We only had red food coloring on hand, so these got iced with pink. I do like how the tops fit so perfectly back on after inserting the custard that you can't see the cut line under the icing.

If you're going to make these, you probably want a much thicker custard filling than these contain. Fanny Cradock, ever prepared, brings out a quote from some famous person or another (she kind of mumbles over the name) who says that "To eat cream buns that are properly made you should be sitting in your bath in your altogether." She then helpfully informs us that of course that's not suitable for parties. As far as I can tell, she made up that quote to compensate for a runny custard cream. I looked around online and couldn't find anyone ever saying anything about eating cream buns in the bath. With that said, it did get all over my shirt the first time I ate one. Maybe I should have eaten one while I was in a bathtub.

When they were fresh, the dough tasted kind of eggy. I know a lot of people worry that choux buns need food-grade humidors to keep them at their best, but I just put these in the refrigerator on an open plate. They tasted a lot better when they were cold. When they were at room temperature, the somewhat eggy taste of the buns clashed with the custard and the icing. Everything harmonized after they refrigerated. 

The choux buns, like a pie crust, are relatively flavorless on their own. That means you can put whatever you want in them. With custard and icing, they tasted just like something from one of those doughnut shops that actually makes them fresh instead of trucking them in. So if you make these, definitely put them in the refrigerator. 

The verdict from others in the house: "Pretty good, but not mind-blowing." I did, however, get a lot of complaints that the filling was too drippy. So if you make these, you'll want to cook your custard a lot thicker than I did. 

But these really are very easy to make if you already know how to make white gravy. And they really are very cheap to make. The only part that took a long time was waiting for the paste to completely cool off before piping it out.

In sum, follow Fanny Cradock and you can never go wrong! But after all these custard-filled delights, you may have difficulty getting into your clothes.

Peanut Butter-White Chocolate Chip Cookies

 Today's recipe begins with something that brought high hopes and disappointment.

I was so excited at the idea of uniting peanut butter and white chocolate. I've never had anything that put these two together, but the combination seems both very obvious and very delicious. But these were just peanut butter in a flavorless white coating. I don't know why I've never thought to put white chocolate chips in peanut butter cookies before these things dashed my hopes, but since inspiration struck here we are:

Peanut Butter Cookies ½ c brown sugar ½ c white sugar ½ c butter 1 c peanut butter 1 egg 1 tsp salt ½ tsp baking soda 1½ c flour ½ tsp vanilla 1 c white chocolate chips (optional) Additional sugar for coating cookies Heat oven to 375°. Grease a cookie sheet. Cream together the butter, sugars, salt, baking soda, and vanilla. Add peanut butter, beat well. Add the egg. Beat until creamy. Mix in the flour, then the chips if desired. Roll the dough into balls of the desired size, then roll in sugar. Place on the baking sheet and press with a fork. These cookies won't spread very much, so you will need to flatten them well. Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until a bit darkened at the edges. Source: Clara S. Matuschak (McConnellsville, Pennsylvania), Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies' Union, 1952

This recipe began as well as cookie recipes do when I wield the spoon. I thought to myself how nice it is that we're using a half cup of all the first ingredients, meaning I could use the same measuring cup to us halfway through the recipe. 

Then, as one tends to do many times in the course of baking, I looked at the recipe to see what I should do next. Then I noticed that we are not supposed to use a half-cup each of white sugar, brown sugar, butter, and peanut butter. It's a half-cup of everything until we get to the peanut butter which is a full cup. This led to a short moment when I asked myself whether I was so enchanted at using the same scoop for all the ingredients that I failed to notice this the first time. This is the tradeoff when one keeps chatting with everyone while cooking instead of shooing people away to better focus. Eventually I decided that I probably had accidentally halved the peanut butter and put more in.

Either this recipe now has the correct amount of peanut butter or I just ruined it.

I think I got the peanut butter right because the dough looked perfect. We'll never know if I owe these cookies to a mistake or not, but I'm almost sure I did exactly what Clara Matuschak intended. The dough was firm enough to shape with your hands but not stiff or crumbly. We gleefully dumped in the special ingredient.

I think that I have differing ideas than Clara Matuschak about cookie size. The recipe claims to make about 60 cookies. I somehow mysteriously only got twenty. Keep in mind that this is with a generous scoop of white chocolate chips adding volume to the cookie dough, so I maybe got two dozen cookies out of this dough that purports to make sixty of them. I'm sure this has nothing to do with my choice to use the eighth-cup measure as a cookie scoop.

 

In all seriousness, I know that I am making much larger cookies than the recipe intended. But since we're getting exactly one third the cookies the recipe promised us, I think we can safely assume that the definition of "medium-sized cookie" has shifted between 1952 and today.

 

I still can't look at a cookie recipe and tell how much they would spread. Most of the peanut butter cookies I've made spread quite a bit, so I didn't want to flatten these too much before they had a chance to get hot and oozy. It turns out these cookies don't merely need a gentle denting with the fork to give them those signature gridlines that all peanut butter cookies should have. You need to squash them flat. Although the peanut butter poufs were rather cute if a bit oversized.

My cookies shown with the cookbook for scale.

 

After smashing the second batch much harder, we got much better cookies. So if you make these cookies, you'll want to be forceful with the fork. These cookies expanded a bit while baking, but otherwise held the same shape as they had before entering the oven. However, it seems that the clubwomen of the Slovak-American Ladies' Association liked their peanut butter cookies a bit overbaked. These cookies, despite being much larger than the recipe intended, were done in about two thirds of the baking time. We have seen this before in a peanut butter cookie recipe from the same book. You may think I need to get the oven checked, but only peanut butter cookies from the Slovak-American Ladies' Association cookbook ge burnt if baked for as long as the recipe directs.

 

With that said, this is a dangerous recipe if you still want to fit in your clothes. White chocolate chips or not, these cookies seem hard but they're delightfully crumbly once you bite into them. They're surprisingly airy inside but still wonderfully filling. We will be revisiting this recipe.... but sparingly because we don't have elastic in our clothes.

Resurrection Rolls: or, Don't trust me with children's recipes

It's Christmas time, which means it's time to bust out the traditional Christmas recipes! Today, we are making a church holiday classic:

Resurrection Rolls 1 or 2 cans of crescent dinner rolls Marshmallows (large size) Margarine (melted) Cinnamon sugar (use a lot more cinnamon than you usually would) Heat your oven---- that is, your tomb--- to whatever temperature is listed in the baking instructions on the can. Separate the dough into triangles (representing the linen cloth used for burial – Luke 23:53). Dip marshmallows (representing the body) “in soil and spices” – Luke 23:56. Wrap the “body” in the “linen cloth” (lightly pinch seams) and lay on cookie sheet. Place in the “tomb” and bake according to directions on the can of the rolls. (We recommend putting foil on your pans in case of leakage.) Remove from “tomb” to discover the body is gone! HE IS RISEN!!! Source: Canadian Bible Society Celebration Cookbook via Caker Cooking

What, you think we're baking for the wrong holiday? Well, what could be more appropriate for the holiday than American-sized marshmallows dipped in simulated butter? Also, a global collapse is no time to adhere to arbitrary calendars.

Anyway, one of the people in the house has taken to hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. 

 

When I saw the marshmallows that barely fit in the mug, I was like "We should allegorically represent Bible stories with prefabricated convenience foods!" After a brief explanation to everyone else in the house, a can of crescent rolls and tub of margarine were added to the grocery list.

To me, the most bizarre part of this recipe is that we're baking without getting out a mixing bowl. But anyway, we decided that our sugary Jesuses were perhaps a bit large. Therefore, we purchased the reduced-calorie linen wrappings.

I can't open biscuit cans. Some people talk about how they get scared every time the can pops in their hand. I on the other hand, always pull the little paper tab that says "PEEL HERE" and end up with a slightly stripped yet still sealed can that I angrily smack into the countertop with un-Christian thoughts until someone else opens it.

Though no one ever tried bring marshmallow Jesuses into bible study when I was of the right age, the recipe shows up in so many church fundraiser cookbooks that I may be one of the few who missed out. The cashier saw the marshmallows and crescent rolls, and he immediately recognized what we were making. It seemed like an amusing way to get some relatively bland yet inoffensive dessert. 

Here we have the Bible represented in decidedly un-Biblical food-style products.

However, our Jesuses were a bit too American-sized to fit in one burial cloth. 

I thought this would be a simple recipe, but it is really hard to pinch this rubbery bread dough shut around a slippery greased marshmallow. You just never know what recipes will involve skills beyond yours.

We only had enough linen for four Jesuses.

Also, I have a big rant about package design. You can't open a can of biscuits without ripping the baking instructions off. Surely they know what parts of the can will get torn off when you open them, so why can't they print the instructions around them? We had to look up the baking instructions for these prefabricated simulacra of bread online.

"Could you check the package and see how long we're supposed to bake them?"

 

We were all so amused at this recipe that two of us just sat in front of the oven to see if Jesus would leak. He did. First, we saw a few marshmallow spurts from the roll that I already knew had the least structural integrity.

But before our resurrection was fully baked, every single corn syrup Jesus had prematurely escaped the tomb. If you drop the religious slant, this recipe could be a slightly messy way to keep children entertained just watching through the oven window.

All right, let's see what Sunday school disaster emerged from our oven.

It's been a long time since I was so emphatically glad I put foil over the pan. I didn't want to even think about getting all this sticky candied-on mess cleaned away. Let's have a look at one of the more intact resurrection rolls.

On one roll, the dough had baked enough to keep a shape before the marshmallow oozed out. If you were to carefully unstick it from the pan and transfer it to a plate without causing a collapse, you could get the ecclesiastic metaphor across to the wee ones without explaining why Jesus is now all over the pan. 

As for the taste: these are exactly like canned cinnamon rolls. Maybe they use the same dough in both. But I think we all know that the taste isn't the point of these. But with that said, these are a surprisingly good if somewhat messy breakfast-or-dessert item.

The perils of food processor cheesecake

Sometimes, one wants to branch out from banana bread. I think randomly passing by the graham crackers in the grocery store while aware that we had rapidly-expiring bananas on the countertop gave me a slight craving for banana cheesecake that festered and grew until I went out and found a recipe for it. I've never had (much less made) a banana cheesecake before. As much as I like cheesecake, it's not something I get cravings for. But just like I often want to make peanut brittle when it's frigid out (even though I don't really like it the rest of the year), apparently sometimes a cheesecake just insidiously takes over my mind until I make it.

Banana Cheesecake 2 (8-oz.) pkg. cream cheese 1 c. bananas (ripened) 1 c. sugar 1 graham cracker crust (use a deep pie pan) 2 eggs Beat cream cheese until soft, add sugar and eggs. Beat well, add bananas, mix in and pour into graham cracker shell. Bake in oven for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Source: Cooks.com

 

Looks straightforward enough, doesn't it? I wanted a recipe without boxes of cake mix, cottage cheese, or any other odd things in the batter. I also avoided any cheesecake recipe that involved gelatin instead of baking.

When we were purchasing bananas last week, the normal ones were green enough we could hang them up for a festive Saint Patrick's Day mood. The organic bananas were perfectly ripe, yet exactly twice as expensive. However, towards the end of the fruit shelf lay bags of bananas on clearance, well into the "eat these now or they will expire" phase. Delighted with being able to economize on fruit, we brought them back to the house. Now I wonder if I saved any money if half of the bananas had to be hastily put into desserts because we weren't eating them fast enough.

Anyway, some people go out of their way to find single-bowl recipes. Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are making this not a one-bowl recipe but a one-appliance one:

We at A Book of Cookrye are learning all about the food processor. These things just never figured into our culinary lives. We've had blenders, but I didn't encounter a food processor in person until I went to cooking school. My mother wasn't very big on filling the kitchen with sporadically-used appliances. We've used the food processor for relatively tame things like making pie crust and grinding graham crackers (the latter for what would have been my Christmas cake this year). Today, we will make the food processor whizz its way into making a complete dessert!

 

At first I was absolutely delighted to try this exciting new approach to baking.  Instead of putting ingredients into a bowl in the right order and ensuring proper mixing and incorporation, we can just dump everything in and press a button! Or so I thought. Despite the motor's best efforts, the cream cheese hovered over the whirlpool, steadfastly remaining above it all.

This initial failure turned out to be for the best. While I was doing some rubber-spatula reshuffling, I realized I had forgotten a certain crucial ingredient:

I was just too excited about using this new, modern appliance to think about minor details like whether I had added the sugar. I don't know whether I wanted cheesecake or if I just wanted the experience of food-processing one. If you recall how much happiness I got out of using a cornstick pan, you can no doubt surmise how I went right over the moon while using the same countertop device to pulverize my graham cracker crust and then make the cheesecake to pour into it. However, my excitement waned when I opened up the machine to find a sweet soup of cream cheese chunks.

I began to suspect that perhaps I shouldn't have dumped all the ingredients into the food processor all at once. But like I said, food processors are a new device to me. I don't know anything about how to use them correctly. So instead, I let it run for long stretches of time. Then I pulsed it repeatedly in case the starting and stopping made a difference. However, no matter what I did, I still had little specks of cream cheese that absolutely refused to mix in.

Eventually, I decided that I would have to pour all of this batter through a strainer and then put the curds into a blender. That was too much work, so I just dumped it all in a pie pan and hoped for the best. 

I can't decide if sprinkling graham cracker crumbs on top made it look nicer or not.

While it was baking, I decided to test something that I had been wondering the whole time I was getting this made. We have successfully made beef fat biscuits, beef fat pie crust, and even beef fat cookies. Beef fat has proven to be a surprisingly neutral flavoring. I wanted to know what would happen if we used it instead of butter in a graham crust--- but I didn't want to risk a whole cheesecake. So I made a little bit of test graham cracker crust in a bowl instead.

This is the first time anything has tasted beefy. You would think it would be the beef fat shortbread since it has absolutely nothing to hide any suspicious flavors. But no, the beef fat graham crust tasted ruinously meaty. But no matter, we didn't put this would-have-been cheesecake ruiner in the pie pan. 

At any rate, the finished cheesecake suggested that we have a bit of oven tilt.

We cut into this as soon as it was cold enough, and it did not taste like a cheesecake. It was a very nice, light-textured custard pie with a hint of banana. In texture, it reminded me of the ricotta pie I made once out of an Italian cookbook. 

However, after it had sat in the refrigerator for a day, it had gotten denser and tasted like the cheesecake we meant it to be. If I had to guess, I would say that the little cream cheese speckles interspersed throughout somehow dissolved and melded with the rest of the pie after a day or so. At any rate, if you mix this like a normal person instead of like a food processor enthusiast, you will no doubt be delighted with what you get. I thought I was the only one in the house who liked it until I came into the kitchen a few days later and saw someone else eating the last of it right out of the pie pan.