Key Lime

Yes, I am writing three different journal/pie entries in one day. The thing is, this stuff is all so important that each subject needs its own entry! Key lime pie definitely deserves an entry to itself... This pie was an adventure for me. Key lime pie requires a cookie crumb crust. I'd never done a cookie crumb crust before (AHHH!). Key lime pie is one of those pies that doesn't have solid fruit in it. The only other pie I'd done that didn't have solid fruit would be pumpkin pie... None of my pumpkin pies have ever turned out quite right. (Long story... I'll explain when I get to trying to make pumpkin pie.) So this was all pretty much a new experience for me. It started out interesting as well. Through a bit of a misunderstanding (as in me misunderstanding what the cookbook was telling me) my mom ended up buying 48 limes when I only needed 20... and that's 20 limes for two pies. Yeah, we have 28 extra limes in our refrigerator right now. It's a good thing limes are cheap. After that initial mishap things went fairly smoothly.

Let's start with the cookie crumb crust. Key lime pie calls for a graham cracker cookie crumb crust. Fortunately cookie crumb crusts are wonderfully easy to make. All it takes are the cookie crumbs (hence the name COOKIE CRUMB crust), sugar, and butter. Mix all that together, pat it into your pie tin, bake for 5-10 minutes, and you've got this:

Two lovely cookie crumb crusts... Next came zesting my limes. For two key lime pies I needed 8 teaspoons of lime zest. That doesn't sound like much; and how hard can it be to zest a few limes, right? WRONG! Zesting is HARD! It took me at least 45 minutes to zest 20 limes (though in the end I did have a little more zest than I needed) and by the end of that my hands were SORE. In that hour of zesting I also learned that it's important to keep your eyes closed for the most part. You never know when the lime peal is going to send some juice your way! In the end all of this hard work did make for a nice picture though:

So I had my lime zest, the hard part was over, right? Once again... WRONG! Next I had to juice all of those limes. Fortunately just that day my dad had fixed our food processor and it has an appliance for juicing. (Otherwise I might still have been juicing limes now.) It was during this juicing time that I discovered that there was a paper-cut on my thumb. Lime juice + paper-cut = OUCH! Even so I managed to get the needed lime juice:

Then it's a simple process of combining the lime juice, zest, sweetended condensed milk, and a LOT of egg yokes. Take that and pore it into the cookie crumb crusts and this is what you've got:

Yummy looking, yes? I thought so... But all those unbaked egg yokes probably wouldn't be good for you, so I decided to bake it. I put it in the oven, waited for the 20 minutes the cookbook told me to wait, and then checked the pies. Not done. Three minutes later, still not done. Five minutes after that... And then I realized that the whole knife check (where you take a knife, stick it into the pie, and if it comes out clean it's done) doesn't work with key lime pie! Fortunately the pies didn't appear to be overdone. (Not that I would know what an overdone key lime pie would look like.) I let the pies cool on the counter until they reached room temperature and then put them in the refrigerator overnight. Then today I made whipped cream and pipped it onto each pie. The finished pie (with whipped cream) looked quite good:

I took one of the pies into my ELI class today and they seemed to enjoy it. Personally I thought that it was a bit too sweet. I'm not certain if that's because I was using regular limes as opposed to key limes (yes there is a difference though the cookbook said that regular limes could be used), or if it's just too sweet of a pie for my personal taste. Either way, everyone seemed to enjoy it. I think that's one of the best things about this ELI, seeing people's faces light up when I give them pie.