Bye, bye Miss American Pie

As many of you know, I love to bake. I pride myself in my pecan pie and for me, summer is defined by homemade blackberry pies. All the way homemade -- from picking the berries, making the dough, and putting it all together.

One of the most striking cultural differences you will find wherever you travel is food. Television, movies, music -- all of these can be downloaded and absorbed easily. But food? Unless you want to pay ridiculous prices at an import store, you're out of luck. When I was in the rural village with the art students, I had to answer the question, "What does peanut butter taste like?" followed by a series of questions about the possible usage of this item. Now, I was never really a fan of the PB and J, but it sticks out as a childhood memory.

So like the s'mores, my host family knew of the apple pie from American films and were most eager to try one for themselves. This, I thought, I can do. The actual food recipe that my mother sent to me may just be out of my cooking ability but baking is my forte. I wanted to bake them a pie to get to know my host siblings better, to say thank you for all the cakes they've made me, and to be a bigger part of the family.

This is what resulted.

How to Make the Worst and Most Embarrassing Pie EVER:

Step One: Find the Pan

After class one day, I went with some people from my program to Tesco to try and find a pie plate because when trying to describe pie to my host family, it was clear that they would not have such a dish. They refer to pie as a kind of cake, which makes a pie purist such as myself feel unsettled. Now, Tesco is a British company but they have several stores across the city. I figured of all places, they would have one.

And they did not. They had a very shallow tart dish and a cake pan. Knowing we had both of these items at home, I purchased neither. After much deliberation, I decided to cook the pie in...the cake pan

Step Two: Find the Ingredients

Apple pie is not that hard, in terms of ingredients, but I had to find the Czech words. Luckily, I knew many of them already

1. Flour -- mouka
2. Butter -- maslo
3. Water -- voda
4. Apple -- jablko
5. Sugar -- cukr
6. Cinnamon -- skořice
7. Nutmeg -- ??

Yes, that's right. I made the pie and I still don't know if I used the right ingredient. This did not translate so well into Czech. I got some word that had nut in it, what my host mother showed me looked different. It smelled similar, just with a different texture. This began my "ah, what the heck" attitude towards baking the pie.

Step Three: Measure the Ingredients

I love the United States, but why on Earth do we have to be on a completely different measuring system from the rest of the world? My mother, who I adore, converted only the temperature for me -- the only conversion I needed that my phone will do for me. The others required the internet which I rarely have at home now. When I tried to explain this dilemma to my host mother, she seemed to think it was of no issue. As I've gathered so far, the Czechs mostly just use recipes as a guideline but improvise.

Let me repeat -- IMPROVISE. You should never, under any circumstances, improvise a baked good. If Top Chef has taught me anything, you cannot fix a pastry once you go wrong.


Step Four: Make the Dough

I decided that since I was using the cake pan, I would make some additional pie crust. But only a little. Math, however, has never been my forte. I ended up with enough dough not only for the deep dish pan but also for two smaller tartlets. I also had to make the dough in the morning, put it in the fridge, and come back to it in the afternoon while we went to a Festival and visited with some friends.

Not only was it as hard as a rock, but it simply refused to be rolled out thinly. I knew then that I had used too much flour because I did not need any to cover the rolling pin or the countertop and the dough did not stick to anything. But at this point, there was nothing I could do except hammer away at it and hope that I could get it thin enough

Step Five: Assemble the raw ingredients

Aside from perhaps eating too many sugared apples, this was fine

Step Six: Combine, and cook in oven

So I used the temperatures my mother gave me, but I should have adjusted more for the timing of the pie. I cooked them for 40 minutes and they did not have that golden brown flaky look to them. My family was sooo excited to try them that we ate the little tartlets right then.

I cannot begin to describe how disappointed I was in the taste. The crust was ALL wrong, and the tartlets were so small that there was barely any filling. We're eating the cake-pie later tonight (I told them we needed vanilla ice cream, or vanilikova zmrzlina -- we ended up with hazelnut/vanilla) and I am praying, crossing my fingers and any other form of good luck that the big one is better.