Christmas Cookies from the Grave!

 You just never know where you'll find a recipe.

Find A Grave

I saw this making the reposting rounds and just had to give it a go.

Mom's Christmas Cookies Cream: 1 cup sugar ½ cup oleo Add: 2 beaten eggs 1 tsp vanilla Add: 3 cups flour 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt Add the flour alternately with 1 cup cream. Refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. Before the dough gets cold, it may seem too soft to work with. But it will firm up in the refrigerator. Roll the dough out to a little over ¼ inch thickness, using plenty of flour to keep it from sticking. Cut it with the cookie cutters of your choice. (The cookies will puff a lot, so simple shapes will look best). Use plenty of flour to prevent the dough from sticking.* Work quickly, and put the dough back in the refrigerator whenever you're not working with it. Bake at 350° until golden on the bottom when you lift one up to check. Cool, then frost. *I found it easiest to just coat the entire dough ball in flour and dust off any excess before rolling. It did not stick at all. Maxine Menster's grave via The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette

 I thought Maxine Menster had said she'd let others have her recipe over her dead body, but her daughter and husband said in an interview that she would readily give the recipe to whoever asked while she was alive. They thought etching the recipe on her grave was a sweet and fitting tribute to Mom. Maxine Menster is still giving out cookies and happiness even after she died.

And so, let us get to making cookies! While we keep most baking ingredients at hand, we had to do a wee bit of shopping for this. We don't have cream, nor do we have...

I was going to use actual butter since we already have it in the house, but Maxine Menster specifically tells us to use oleo. (As a side note, I would love to see a map of what places say oleo and what places say margarine.) I thought about using butter anyway, but I remember reading an article a while ago about someone who tried to make one of his late mother's signature cookies. He had the recipe in her handwriting, but it never came out as good as hers did. He made sure to only ever get the best quality ingredients. But while his various attempts were delicious, he could never quite match what Mom made. Then he remembered that Mom had always had a box of margarine in the refrigerator. After he cast aside the top-quality butter and used the cheap margarine, the cookies set off bells and flashbacks when he ate them. So, to ensure that we have the same cookies that Maxine Menster's family thought worth literally setting in stone, we have obtained margarine.

 

Margarine has always been so soft right out of the refrigerator that I've never had to let it un-refrigerate before. I think it's one of the many conveniences of modern chemistry-derived foods. But this stuff was so hard that no amount of spoon-bashing would make it break down and mix with the sugar. Maxine Menster directs us to cream them, but we couldn't even de-lump the oleo. Then we remembered: this kitchen has a dishwasher! We can bring out the power tools without having to handwash them later!

Because we had a dishwasher, we could also expend the bowl and tiny whisk necessary to transform our intact egg into the beaten egg that Maxine Menster tells us we should be using. Rarely do I ever beat eggs in advance; I've always figured they'll be beaten enough once they're mixed in good and hard.

I'm not sure what this tiny whisk is for, but it's perfect for these tiny little bowls of egg.

I thought that once we'd used the mixer to force the margarine and sugar to cream together as if I'd taken the former out to soften, it'd be a short road with a wooden spoon to get everything else mixed. I was quite wrong. The margarine-sugar stuff in the bowl was as hard as those artificial butter sticks had been before I ever did anything with them. This is the best I could manage after an unnecessarily long time attempting to stir them with a spoon.

Soften your oleo before baking, everybody!

 

Fortunately, our wonderful electric mixer was already at hand and ready to succeed where hand-stirring failed.

 

The curds floating in sugary soup gave me flashbacks to another unfortunate time we had a dessert recipe look like curds floating in whey. I was starting to fear that I had gone out and bought margarine and cream for a failure of a recipe and a waste of time. Had Maxine done that bit where you sabotage your ingredients when giving out the recipe so that no one else can ever make it as good as you? Was this a prank from beyond the grave? Did I forget the vanilla?

There. I remembered now.

If this recipe failed and turned into a paste-like mess like the last time my batter turned into cottage cheese, I was ready to be irked at Maxine Menster, her family who picked this gravestone, and the stonecutters who foisted it upon the world. But we gamely moved forward, thanking our friendly local drive-thru for their generous donation to Our Pantry of Cookrye.

The free salt packets (as if fast food isn't briny enough) partially made up for the cream we had to buy for today's recipe. It's been a long time since I bought cream for anything. I'd forgotten how thick it is. Check out the height of the dome it's making in the measuring cup.

It's striking how this recipe comes so close to butter. First we use imitation butter, now we're using butter in its raw, unchurned state. It coats the batter like slime before it actually mixes in.

I don't know what the cream is supposed to do in this recipe. When I tasted the dough, I was kind of expecting a massive, magical flavor change from it. After all, why use such a rarely-deployed ingredient (well, rarely-deployed in cookie dough anyway) if it's not going to make your cookies into ecstasy on a cute plate? But despite tasting anticlimactically normal, the dough did taste really good. And it finally stopped being so curdled and weird. It now looked, well, creamy.

It also fit perfectly in an old pint tub. We're halving the recipe, so if you're making Maxine Menster's original quantities, you will need two empty sour cream containers to hold it all. Well, they did say it was her Christmas cookies. And while Christmas cookie recipes are different everywhere you bake, they always crank out enough to feed your entire extended family as if you haven't been making an entire holiday feast.

Ready to refrigerate!

While the dough was having its meditation time in the refrigerator, we decided to go ahead and get the icing ready. We decided to economize and use the rest of the margarine stick that we'd put into the cookies. After all, if the margarine was so resolutely rigid, surely it would give us icing that would stand majestically rather than drooping whenever we tried to make a cute design. That did not work, and all we got out of the icing was sugar glop.

Fortunately, our icing could be saved. We still have a massive can of shortening in the pantry from when we made the Hillary Clinton cookies. A little bit of it would be just the thing to prop the icing up whenever we try to pipe it into peaks.

Hillary Clinton made this moment possible.

Sure enough, our icing now had the strength to stay wherever we put it. It did not drip, nor did it ooze. Now that we had succeeded at the making of icing, we could see that it was sadly colorless. Sadly for my magenta dreams, we only found one stray bottle of yellow.

 In an inadvertent tribute to the margarine Maxine Menster led us to, the icing was precisely the same shade of artificial yellow. 

 

To prevent the icing from drying out, I put it in an old margarine tub. It really does look like we still have imitation butter in there. I was a bit worried someone would get out the tub of margarine, see a margarine-looking substance in there, and get an undesired sweet surprise after putting it on toast.

Well that's the icing done. Let's have a look at the cookie dough, which by now was chilled out enough to roll without it oozing everywhere. It held itself together well enough once we had it out, but it first put up a surprisingly strong effort to stay stuck to the tub.

This next step is apparently controversial among bakers: the dough was so sticky that I plopped it onto the mound of flour, getting all sides good and coated. I've done this every time a dough turns out hopelessly sticky. 

Some baking teachers will say it's a great way to actually get your cookies and rolls to be the shape you want. Without getting your cookie dough thoroughly covered in flour to barricade the stickiness, your fingers and your spatula would pull and stretch your unbaked creations out of their cute shapes whenever you  when you try to move them. But contrary to my successful experience, others will say it makes everything ruinously floury and glutenous. As for me, I started doing it long before I ever took a baking class. It always works in my hands, and it spares me many hours of scouring stuck-on dough from the rolling pin and countertop.

We don't have a baking Drawer Of Dreams in this kitchen. There is no magical stash of fifty kinds of colored sprinkles and every cookie cutter you could ever wish for. So we had to fall back to that old standby: a cup. I could have been even lazier and just cut the dough into squares, but you don't botch and butcher recipes from beyond the grave. 

While cups are of course perfect for cookie cutting, it's annoying when the dough sticks in there and you can't just gently push it out from above. You end up awkwardly shaking it until your cookie falls free, trying not to shake it too hard lest you fling it across the kitchen.

I knew these cookies were going to expand a bit because we put baking powder in them. But I was not prepared for their dramatic expansion. They entered the oven looking like crackers...

...and emerged shortly thereafter looking like rolls!

Now I usually don't ice cookies because my baking urge is usually sated by the time the first things come out of the oven. But Maxine Menster said they should be iced. The instructions are literally set in stone. But with that said, I think every iced cookie should be good without icing. If it's a lousy cookie hiding its lameness under icing, all you're doing is shoveling icing into your cake hole. Therefore, I made sure to try one before icing any of them. 

When I started this recipe, I was worried what to say if they were bad. I don't believe you should sanctimoniously speak no ill of the dead, but I didn't want to say that Maxine Menster made lousy cookies all her life. As soon as I tasted one of these, all my worries about tact in the face of disappointment melted just like the cookies do in your mouth. They are amazing. They're light, yet at the same time wonderfully dense. They're exactly sweet enough to be lovely, but not enough to overload you.

I piped the icing on because I figured it'd be easier and faster to just squirt it on top than to try to spread it. It's weird icing Christmas cookies by myself. It was always a ritual growing up: everyone got two or three of the cookies Mom had made earlier that day, and we could spend as long as we want putting as many colors of icing and different cake decorations on them. Icing all the cookies yourself is like when one year someone offhandedly asks you to stuff the stockings since you were going to be up at 3AM anyway. It's not so much that the "magic of Christmas" (read: those years before you realize the labor involved) is ending, it's just yet another confirmation that you're not nine anymore.

If we look from left to right, we can see how I was first a bit shaky-handed, then I got the knack of it, then I got overconfident and sloppy. Let's  instead look at after I got them on an actual tray because you can't stack iced cookies on a plate.

At first I thought they were cute spirals, but then I realized that I just made an entire batch of cookies look like car cigarette lighters.

In conclusion, these cookies are amazing. I would definitely keep the recipe at hand.  They're delicious uniced, but a bit of icing only makes them better. These cookies disappeared at a fast rate once they were cooled and iced. If I hadn't cut the recipe in half, we'd all be worried about the fit of our clothes from these marvels of cream and oleo.

Have a wonderful holiday, everyone! Remember to stay at home, and tell your nearest and dearest to visit another time after this disaster is over. It's better to cancel Christmas this year than to end up putting your own beloved recipes on your tombstone lest they get buried with you.

Let's Bake with Hillary Clinton!

Amidst the disaster that has been the last few years, did you notice that we had no First Lady Cookie Contest this year? I sure as heck didn't. Not only did the First Lady Cookie Contest die relatively unnoticed, the magazine that birthed it (pulled it out of the oven?) has ceased to exist. So today, we present the recipe that won more first-lady bakeoffs than any other:

Hillary Clinton's Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies 1½ c unsifted all-purpose flour 1 tsp salt* 1 tsp baking soda 1 c shortening 1 c light brown sugar 1/2 c white sugar 1 tsp vanilla 2 eggs 2 c rolled oats 1 (12-ounce) package semi-sweet chocolate chips (or 2 cups) Heat oven to 350°. Grease baking sheets. Combine flour, salt and baking soda. Beat together shortening, sugars and vanilla in a large bowl until creamy. Mix in eggs one at a time, then beat until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Then stir in the oats in chocolate chips. Drop batter by well-rounded teaspoonsful onto greased baking sheets. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until golden. Cool cookies on sheets on wire rack for 2 minutes. Remove cookies to wire rack to cool completely. *We recommend halving the salt. Source:The now-frozen-in-time (no really, those are their exact words at the top of the page) Clinton White House

For those of you reading this from outside America, the first lady cookie contest is a faceoff between the wives of the two front-running presidential candidates. (All right, one year it was between one candidate's wife and the other candidate's husband, but he used his wife's recipe from earlier bakeoffs.) It is purported to be a bit of harmless fun-- which people angrily scrutinize every time it comes back around. Analysts and opinion writers attempt to make a complete psychological profile of each woman, trying to diagnose an entire personality and political platform from a reckless deployment of chopped walnuts. Experts and professional dunderheads write painfully long articles about whether we can predict the winner of the election based on their wives' bake-off success. And (maybe) a few people actually try the recipes at home.

A few aspiring first ladies through the years have been caught faking their way through the contest- whether they took recipes off of corporate sites and hastily removed the brand names, or whether they simply had their staffers send in a recipe without even looking at it. Every time a First Lady candidate got busted, it made quite a scandal. Foul play in a cookie contest was an inoffensive enough basis for outrage that even the lightest fluff magazines could get a few angry pages out of it without offending anyone with the realities of politics. 

We would like to make a small defense of those who committed academic dishonesty in the First Lady Cookie Contest. Yes, it's easy to fault someone for plagiarizing cookie recipes for a contest (possibly without even trying them at home). But one should realize that the First Lady Cookie Contest may be the only cookoff outside of home economics class gravy-making competitions that participants must enter, like it or not.  

Now that a dishwasher lives in the kitchen, we can get out enough bowls to measure our ingredients before commencing.

 

As told in the short yet unexpectedly entertaining history of the First Lady Cookie Contest, the contest dates back to 1992 . In that year, Hillary Clinton said perhaps the disastrous words of her entire career: "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but..." 

Amidst the sound and the fury that rocked op-ed sections and letters to the editor around the country, a cookie contest was born. Family Circle magazine announced that they would have a cookie contest between the wives of the two men vying for president. Hillary Clinton won the cookie-off, and her husband went on to win the election. Her cookies had chocolate chips, oatmeal, and enough shortening that Aunt Jenny would have tucked a few Hillary flyers into her recipe pamphlets.

Get a load of that whipped fatty goodness!

I generally avoid shortening. It kind of creeps me out with its preternatural whiteness and its absolute refusal to rot. Shortening is suspiciously flavorless and odorless like any ideal poison, so I replace it with butter whenever possible. However, this recipe won the First Lady bakeoff not once but thrice. We therefore are actually following the ingredient list precisely as written. Because we are carefully scrimping every penny, we purchased the cheapest can of shortening on the store shelf. You may think it'd be one of the tiny ones, and if so you'd be wrong. And so, because of Hillary Clinton, we now have this massive can of synthetic vegetable-derived imitation lard, shoved toward the back of the highest shelf. Every time I glance at the cupboard, I'm faintly unnerved to know it's up there somewhere.

Well, at least the brown sugar adds enough color to remove the aggressively white, freshly-bleached look from the shortening.

 

Those who are interested in presidential history, or at least interested in tracking the aesthetic history of web design will delight in exploring old campaign sites dating all the way back to 1996, all lovingly preserved long after the elections ended. Would you like to try Elizabeth Dole's pecan cookies from 1996? We found today's recipe on the Clinton White House website, which now stands as an undisturbed shrine to 90s web design and to political events from the era of the Spice Girls. Whoever is keeping the website up has apparently made only one alteration: little pop-up notes informing you that the site is no longer updated and is now of historical interest. In a burst of dramatic phrasing rarely seen from archivists, you are told that the website is "frozen in time."

And here we arrive at the entertaining part of every recipe: unnerving other people in the kitchen because you're heeding Fanny Cradock's advice to think of someone you've never liked but you're too well-bred to say anything so you instead take it out on what's in your bowl. It may turn a bit of light stirring into a forceful blur of a spoon handle that produces unnecessarily loud thwacks.

There were three spoons in the little vase that decoratively held them. Two have failed, but this one has steadfastly stirred its way through many dinners and desserts.

The recipes of the First Lady Cookie Contest fascinated people flipping through magazines in waiting rooms right up until 2016. That year, everyone was too busy reading and writing op-eds asking what did it mean that a man was entering a first lady cookie contest? Several people managed to milk entire articles out of the fact that they had to hastily rename it to the gender-neutral Presidential Cookie Poll. Rarely have cookies been such a joylessly analyzed experience outside of the Industrial Consolidated Bakeries shareholders' conference.

Incidentally, those who want to follow the recipes of First Lady Cookie Contests of yore will likely stumble through multiple dead links as you find them. Family Circle, the magazine that came up with the idea and held it every year, quietly shut down in 2019. With regard to the cookie contest that had fascinated the nation every four years, the magazine publisher tersely stated "There are no plans to bring this contest to other Meredith brands at this time." And thus did this nation-gripping contest anticlimactically sputter out of existence. 

This recipe uses equal amounts by volume of oatmeal and chocolate chips.

Hillary Clinton and her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies remained undefeated against any opposing candidate's wife (though she lost another magazine's copycat cookie-off between the wives of presidential hopefuls from the same party). And while other repeat entrants in the First Lady Cookie Contest came up with a different recipe for every election, Hillary resolutely sent the same recipe every time, including when she herself was running for president and the recipe ran under her husband's name instead. It may be lazy, but it's nevertheless an impressive run for a cookie recipe. Hillary won the first and last First Lady Bakeoffs, and won again at some point in between. If she's not a good baker, she at least knew how to hire one when she needed a cookie recipe on short notice.

 

At this point, someone else in the house expressed an interest in the cookie dough. Upon tasting it, he frowned a little and said "It's very salty." I had to agree with him, though I hoped we were actually tasting the baking soda that had not yet gone into the oven and reacted away into fizz and leavening. Everything else about the dough tasted right, so I held out hope that somehow the saltiness would bake out of them or somehow harmonize with the flavors as they changed in the heat. 

Speaking of heat, as we prepared to insert these into the oven, we realized what we had forgotten to do earlier:

Always remember to turn your ovens on, everybody!

Back to the cookies. You can tell this recipe is meant to make enough cookies to hand around a lot (at campaign events, perhaps?). It makes a lot of cookie dough and then tells you to use a tiny spoon to scoop it out. I rarely think about how small a teaspoon is, but I certainly noticed its petite size when facing the possibility of spending such a long time putting so many batches of dainty dough plops in and out of the oven.

With that said, if you would like to make the tiny cookies the recipe specifies, they're perfect for just a little bite of dessert. They ended up being almost exactly the size of the tops of mini muffins. You'd think portion control is a cinch when your cookies are so little, but it unfortunately made them easier to effortlessly eat. In case you're wondering why Hillary never bothered to come up with a new recipe regardless of how many times she entered the contest, this is how many were left of the first batch before the second one had finished baking:

I'd have made the rest of them in the original teaspoon size, but that's quite the time commitment with the oven. Even if you shape all your dough ahead of time so you only have to remove one baking sheet from the oven and seamlessly insert another, you're going to be in the kitchen a long time, peeping into the oven to check if the tops are browned yet. We didn't have that kind of patience, so we scooped out subsequent batches with a tablespoon. Since a tablespoon is triple the size of a teaspoon, the cookies were a more satisfying size.

A quick thank you to my friend who held a flashlight at an artistic angle for this.

While the saltiness didn't bake out, this is nevertheless a damn good cookie recipe. They're crispy on the outside, soft in the middle, and we already agreed that we're keeping it on file. I can't comment on whether they go stale or not because they didn't last long enough.

Baking A Big Graham Cracker Into A Pie Crust (and also putting a pie in it)

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are writing about a graham cracker pie crust! You've seen lots of people make graham crumb crusts, but have you ever had a pie baked in a pie-sized graham cracker? I know it takes a special kind of person to be more excited about the crust than the pie in it, but we're making a big pie shaped graham cracker and then putting a pie in it!

I know it's a bit monochromatic, but have you ever gotten corners like that on a custard?

Banana Cream Pie in a Graham Cracker Crust     Crust: 1 c whole wheat flour ½ c all-purpose flour ½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda ⅛ tsp salt ¼ tsp cinnamon 4 tbsp butter ½ tsp vanilla ¼ c brown sugar (preferably dark) 2 tbsp honey ¼ c milk Sift together both flours, the baking powder, the baking soda, the cinnamon, and the salt. Set aside. Cream together the butter, brown sugar, honey, and the vanilla. Beat until light. Alternately add the dry ingredients in three additions, and the milk in two additions. Start and end with the dry. Refrigerate for at least two hours. Have ready a pie pan coated with cooking spray (be sure to also spray the rim), and also a baking sheet lined with foil and sprayed (or lined with parchment). Coat the entire ball of dough well in flour, and also generously sprinkle flour over the rolling surface. Roll the dough out to perhaps just a little thicker than you normally would for a pie crust. Working quickly, roll the dough around your rolling pin and unroll it across the pie pan. This dough is a bit more crumbly and tricky to work with than most pie crusts. You may want to cut the dough sheet into two or three strips which you lay across the pie pan and then press together. At any rate, be ready to do some patching before it's ready to bake. You also might want to roll the dough out on a sheet of wax paper or a gallon bag to simply lift into the pan, even if you usually don't do it that way. After you have the dough in the pan, cut ½-inch lines throughout the crust (this works better than pricking it with a fork). Refrigerate the crust about twenty minutes or so before baking- it will help prevent shrinking in the oven. When it's ready to bake, heat the oven to 350°. Bake the crust for 10-15 minutes (it may take a bit longer.) Bake for 10-15 minutes or until done. Cool before filling with whatever you like. If there's any extra dough, you can make it into crackers and bake them alongside the crust. Reroll the dough to about ⅛" thick. Cut crackers of the size you would like. Poke them with a fork about every ½ inch apart. Place them on the pan. They don't expand lot, so you can put them rather close (leave at least a quarter inch between them). Source: Maida Heatter's Cookies (1997) via some commenter named Smaug in a thread on Food52

Banana Cream: ½ c sugar 3 tbsp flour 1 pinch salt 3 eggs 1 c milk 1 tsp vanilla 1 envelope (.25oz) unflavored gelatin 3 ripe bananas Soften the gelatin in about 2 tbsp of the milk. Stir together the flour, about half the sugar, and salt in the top of a double boiler. Be sure to break up all lumps. Put the bananas and eggs in a blender and thoroughly blenderize. Add some of the milk if needed to help the blender go. Stir the bananas and the milk into the sugar. Put it over hot water and cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens. Add the gelatin right when you take it off the stove, stirring until it melts and mixes in. Put the bananas in a blender and pour in enough of the custard to help the blender work. Blenderize until smooth. Pour the contents of the blender back into the rest of the custard, along with the vanilla. Taste for sweetness, adding the remaining sugar as needed. Be sure to stir well. Cool to lukewarm. Then pour into the pie crust. adapted from a pecan pie recipe in the Goshen [Indiana] Daily Democrat (1898) via Food Timeline

We actually got this idea from Maida Heatter's chocolate cookbook, which we love so much that we asked an artist friend to make a cover that says THE HOLY BIBLE. In the note above a recipe, she says that a friend made her graham cracker recipe for a pie. Maida Heatter misunderstood this as making a batch of graham cracker dough and rolling it out into a pie crust, tried it herself, and liked the results. Anyway, we don't have our copy of the book in our possession, but we do have the internet at our fingertips. We found a few people who liked all of Maida Heatter's recipes so much that they blogged their way through her recipes (which sounds like a delicious time to me), but none of them made the graham crackers. Fortunately someone posted her recipe in a cooking forum thread. Or at least, posted a recipe. As we don't have the cookbook at hand, we can't verify that it is Maida Heatter's. Anyway, we've been staring at the browning bananas and wondering how good it would be to encase a banana pie in a big graham cracker instead of a pulverized crust.

The original recipe made a lot of graham crackers, so we're cutting it in half. (Was Maida Heatter making crackers for an entire summer camp's worth of smores?) As we do not live in a big house packed full of people, we often cut recipes down to a half or a quarter, which means we have used the one-eighth measuring cup a lot more than we expected. Like the icemaker you may have in your freezer, you don't think you would use it until you have one.

You may have noticed that even when you're not having regional disasters knock out utilities for days, grocery prices have been very strange of late. Everything's gotten more expensive, but there have been some strange price irregularities. We usually get the cheapest imitation vanilla for baking and reserve the good stuff for things that don't go into the oven. Using the cheap vanilla imitations in baked goods doesn't make as much a difference as you might think- we read that most of the compounds that make real vanilla so delicious evaporate away while baking anyway (though all those lovely things evaporating out of your batter or cookie dough will waft out of the oven and make the kitchen smell delightful). You lose no flavorfulness if you use the artificial vanilla in the cake and the more-expensive genuine article in the icing. However, the above-shown bottle was the cheapest vanilla on the shelf when we went on our most recent grocery expedition.

As shown above, we've got the flour mixed and ready to go. Or at least, it's all in one cup. With a dishwasher at hand, I'm getting blissfully used to measuring out all my ingredients before I start cooking. It is such a luxury to have everything standing in a row on the counter, ready to go- and not have to hand-wash a stack of little bowls and tubs after. 

This recipe seems to be pretty straightforward. Once you've got your butter and sugar beaten together in one bowl and your flour and other things mixed in another, you just sort of dump the two bowls together. Oh, and a small amount of milk is involved.

We thought this recipe simply could not be messed up until we added the first splash of milk and the whole thing turned into a mess of brown curds. At this point, we took a long look at what we were making and realized we were doing a recipe from some random person in a comment thread. In these trying times, it's quite the daring move to trust a complete stranger on the internet with even the smallest piece of our grocery budget.

Fortunately, when we got the last of the flour in, it looked like a semicoherent cookie dough. It was sticky, crumbly, and utterly impossible to flatten out in one piece. But, Maida Heatter (or at least some online person claiming to be typing out of her cookbook) tells us this needs to be refrigerated. Since we have a dishwasher now, we can happily put it in its own little tub instead of just shoving cold foods aside until the entire bowl fit in the refrigerator-- without later having to clean both a tub and a bowl. 

This is convenience. I really do think the dishwasher is just as necessary as that marvelous machine that washes your clothes for you. Sure, you can technically do without either one, but you are throwing away so many hours in drudgery.
As we were tidying up the spattered counter, we noticed that we had made a slight error. You know how we were saying how lovely it is to have everything measured before commencing a recipe?  And how with a dishwasher we don't need to hand-wash all those little bowls afterward? Well, it turns out that is not foolproof. While getting everything put away, we noticed that we forgot something:

Well, no matter. It's not like we left out something crucial like the flour.

Now, we could have gone ahead and made the banana cream on the spot, but we didn't want it to sit out for however long it took before the crust was baked, cooled, and ready for it. We thought the banana cream might, I don't know, get too congealed to pour into a pie pan. So while our big ball of graham cracker refrigerated, we cleaned all the heaps of flour-dust and other cracker-making mess. We may be blessed with a dishwasher now, but we still have to wipe up every splat that we get on the counter. Since we are hopelessly messy, it takes so long that by the time we had thrown the last wet rag into the laundry hamper, the graham dough was ready to roll.

We took this opportunity to add the cinnamon that we so tragically forgot earlier:

In theory the rolling pin would smash it in.

The pie crust actually rolled out into a decent sheet, but our rolling pin is too narrow to do that bit where you wrap the dough around it like you're using a curling iron, and then unroll it over the pan. 

Making pies in these days of isolation always makes me think "I should get a real rolling pin!" Then I realize that unlike seventy years ago when we didn't have to wear face masks, I can't go out and share pies with friends. 

Maybe adulthood is one long process of having fewer and fewer people to cook with. In high school, we all got together at our parents' houses and just made things together for the hell of it. (I think our parents endured the messes because they could at least follow the splatters and know where we were.) In college, it was always a bit tricky to find a time when two or more people could get together, and having five of us at the same place at the same time required some advance planning and aligning of schedules. Now there's a plague on and we can't visit anyone. 

Getting back to today's pie, there's no point in buying a rolling pin wide enough to actually do a pie until this relentless tide of adulthood-and-plague-induced messages like "We must visit sometime" and "I'll let you know when I'm in town" reverses course. We decided to simply cut the pie crust until it was narrow enough to roll up around our can of cooking spray, and then press it all together in the pan.

 

Maida Heatter, in the book we got this idea from, said that the dough handled "beautifully." This was not our experience. It was crumbly and prone to tearing apart under its own weight. We simply could not lift it off the counter, it tore whenever we tried.
An important kitchen tip for those who are entering the wonderful world of pie crusts: clear off counterspace for swooping arm movements- you'll need it when attempting to get the pie crust from the countertop to the pan. You don't want to barely squeeze your pie pan in among the things you've been meaning to put away, you want a lot of room to almost throw the pie crust on top without knocking stuff over. That way you can give it the extra lift it needs to land flat in the pan rather than in a sad wad of crumpled dough.

The other half of the pie crust went on a lot easier after we cleared enough things out of the way to almost throw it on like a tablecloth.

Fortunately, the same qualities that made this dough so hard to work with made it easy to patch. It was soft enough that we could press it right into shape. It was also sticky enough that patches didn't just stay put, but smooshed and melded seamlessly wherever you pressed them in. I started to think that perhaps I should have skipped the entire business with a rolling pin and just sort of patted and pressed the dough directly into the pan.

We gave it some knife slashes because this dough seemed a bit too... heavy for fork-pricking. Like, it seemed as if fork-holes wouldn't do anything to stop any bubbles this would make in the oven. So we gave it long lines instead.

As you can see, we had a fair amount of extra dough after we had this thing made. Given what a pain in the ass this had been to roll out without it tearing up or sticking to itself and everything else, it seemed masochistic to do this to ourselves again. But we all know how much I hate food waste.

I did that braid after rerolling and cutting the dough enough times that I wanted to just get it all in the oven and be done.

Contrary to my dread, the dough handles just fine if you're cutting it into small little pieces. It only falls apart if you try to keep it into one big pie-sized sheet. It could easily make adorable little tartlets if you used a muffin pan to make little crust-cups. These lifted off the counter and laid onto the pan without ripping or crumbling the way the massive dough sheet did when we attempted to get it into the pie pan.

And now we get to the banana cream! To make a full disclosure, I was only making this because I really wanted to try making a big pie-shaped graham cracker, and people have this odd customary insistence that pies should have something in them. We originally planned to make custard and blenderize bananas into it. But the more pies I've made, the more I dislike pies you can't actually cut. Maybe I'm turning into the judgemental old lady who has Opinions about petty food things, but lately I've gotten more and more annoyed at runny pies you can't actually cut. And so, we brought in a special guest ingredient to force this pudding to act like a pie:

With this magic hoof-powder, we successfully transformed a sloppy pie pan of pudding into a pie that cuts so sharp it has corners.

 

Due to a bit of a mistake (which we have accounted for when writing out the recipe), the pie filling was too sweet. We forgot to reduce the sugar a bit from the original to allow for the bananas. But aside from that, it was a perfectly lovely (and perfectly sliceable!) banana pudding custard. I know the sharp edges of this pie makes it look like it was as jiggly as the most ambitious multilayered potluck salad, but the gelatin only barely held it in shape. It still had the texture of pudding when you ate it. If you, like me, get annoyed at sloppy cream pies that you scoop instead of slice, consider slipping in a little gelatin.
But our big exciting thing today was making a massive graham cracker big enough to encase an entire pie in. And not only does it work, it is absolutely delicious! The crackers we made from the extra dough were so much better than store-bought ones- they had more flavor and also were less crumbly (and therefore better suited for putting the odd dollop of surplus banana cream on top of). I highly recommend trying this for your next pie. And maybe baking your own graham crackers for smores seems a bit excessive, but they would be the best burned-marshmallow-on-a-cracker you ever ate (you might cut the recipe in half or even a quarter though, elsewise you will spend a long time getting pans in and out of the oven).
The long instructions may look a bit daunting, but this really isn't any harder than doing any other pie crust. I'm already contemplating lovely fresh fruit pies in one of these. Also, for a cute serving idea, the filling was nice if we just scooped it out onto the crackers.