So much baking! Also, oven fire!
Saturday was Eric's birthday! Happy Birthday, Eric! And, like every birthday, all he wanted was to smoke ridiculous amounts of meat, drink rum drinks, and hang out with friends. He's pretty easy to please (except the meat smoking, which took from 7am until 7pm, but he swears he enjoys it!) He also made corn and zuchini maque choux and cole slaw!
He also asked for his favorite Key Lime Pie, which I only make about every 5 years. That's because it is CRAZY. It requires a ton of prep work, and probably takes three years off your life for every slice you eat. Here, let me demonstrate:
Crust:
10 oz graham cracker crumbs
4 oz sugar
1 stick butter
some vanilla
Make the crumb crust and put it in a 10" springform pan, pressing the crust up the sides.
Filling:
2 cups of key lime juice - we juiced 2lb of key limes. They're so tiny!
1/2 cup of lemon juice - 4 lemons (well, we were making up for a little bit of key lime juice, too.)
3 cups of egg yolks (I separated 4 dozen eggs for this!)
8 cans of sweetened condensed milk
Ok, I'm doing this from memory, but I don't think there is anything else in the pie. Mix the juices with the yolks and whip. Fold in the sweetened condensed milk and pour into the crust. We ended up with a little less than half of the filling leftover. Second pie!
Bake for 2 hours at 225. Chill before serving. Slice into tiny slices. Really. Sprinkle each slice with 1 cup of chopped, toasted pistachios (you can see I cheated).
There you go. It's pretty crazy!
Then we had 4 dozen egg whites leftover, so I made two pavlovas, using two different recipes.
I made the pavlova on the left using Baking Bites recipe. It turned out very flat and pillowy all the way through.
The pavlova on the right is made using Allrecipes' Easy Pavlova recipe (my go to pavlova). It puffs up and becomes crisp, with a tiny marshmallowy center.
Oh! I should mention my adjustments to the recipes. I actually doubled each recipe, but still confined it to a 9" circle. I like puffy pavlovas! And I only use 1 cup of sugar per 4 egg whites.
Although the Baking Bites' recipe was closer to the pavlova I had in a restaurant, I think the Allrecipes' pavlova was the crowd favorite. It was gone by the end of the night!
On Sunday morning, I wanted to take care of some of the leftovers (SO MANY EGG WHITES!), so I decided on an omelet. And since I had bagel dough lying around, I tried to make bagels.
WELL. Apparently the springform I used on the pie was quite leaky, and the bottom of the oven got covered in ... butter, probably? When I turned the heat up to bake the bagels, the oven caught fire! ARGH!
Nothing bad happened, other than some panic and the fire alarm waking everyone up. We got the situation under control, and cleaned the oven. But it did mean I couldn't bake my bagels in it. So, Eric suggested the toaster oven. It just barely goes up to the necessary temperature, but it was enough to bake the bagels. I couldn't do the steam bath bit, so they were chewier than normal, but I kind of wonder if I don't like that better?
Anyway, bagels were accomplished! Omelet was accomplished! And it was only 11 by the time I got breakfast!