The Cosby's Peanut Butter Pie Crust Disaster

My brother, baby sister, and I lost our cable TV privileges when I was 7. I call them privileges because we moved to a new house. Growing up in an underdeveloped country in the late 80’s, before technology took over the universe, if your parents told you that there was no way to get a cable signal in your new house a little outside the main city, even with rabbit ears and tin foil, you believed them. Many years later we found out, that while that may have been true the first year or two of our almost 9 years in the house, it was not the entire truth. My parent’s rationale behind the cable tv, or lack thereof, was that they were tired of having dinner with Bill Cosby and his TV family. While entertaining, especially to a 6 and 4 year old, Rudy’s shenanigans and Cliff’s ridiculous misadventures were not the way my parents wanted to spend every evening for the next 12 years. Not to mention, we were moving out of an apartment into a house with a yard, close to a pool and park, they wanted us to play outside!

So we got out. We devised games during summer vacations where we swung from palm trees and slid down hills in cardboard boxes. We went to the swimming pool, we set up the slip-n-slide, the crocodile mile, the badminton net. We rode bikes, played chase, brought the boom box outside and roller bladed in the street. We perfected fort building and tree climbing.

And then it would rain. We didn’t have the Huxtables to turn to, so we devised new games. We played Cooking Show in my little sisters kitchen and made homemade perfumes in the sink. Maybe that’s where the creativity comes from, or the need to try new things and make things up. That spirit is what filled me when I embarked on probably one of my biggest cooking disasters to date.

As you know, I have this new tart pan that is just begging to be used. For my mother’s birthday I wanted to make something very special. Since she has a wheat aversion, but I wanted to make a pie, I tracked down some very awesome pie crust recipes to put in my tart pan. The idea was going well until I decided to alter these recipes. I know pie crusts are pretty delicate, but where’s the fun if you can’t bend the rules a little bit. So I decided I wanted to make a peanut butter pie crust, since I’m a huge peanut butter fan. Then I was going to fill it with a chocolate mousse. In theory it sounds superb, in reality, I couldn’t even salvage it. It also didn’t help that this genius idea of mine came at about 11 pm and I only had part of the ingredients and decided to substitute the rest.

I’m not even going to post the recipe; it was that terrible. But I will let you in on what went wrong:

First, even though I refrigerated the dough for the appropriate amount of time, it was very sticky; it wouldn’t roll right and was very, very soft and gummy.

Second, I couldn’t even get the dough to stay in the pan. It slid right down the sides and stuck to my fingers.

So I was stuck with this unworkable dough. ‘Let’s improvise!’ I thought. So I decided to try to make some sort of thumbprint cookie that I could then fill with a chocolate something or other. I fashioned these very messy, sticky ‘cookies’. (Cookies is probably a very generous term for whatever these were.) I cooked them for 8 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Then I cooked them for 8 more minutes. They wouldn’t cook all the way through and tasted like cardboard. The only thing I could liken them to was in grade school when you take your handprint and make a Christmas ornament with the flour and salt and then you decorate it, only my cookies were far from that cute or salvageable.

Lessons learned:
1. Combining all sorts of creative ideas in a sink as a child is phenomenal. As an adult, dealing with real, perishable, expensive ingredients, creative ideas are great BUT maybe have some sort of experience with pie crusts before fashioning your own.
2. Peanut butter may not go with everything like I previously thought.

I may have showed up empty handed to my mom’s birthday, but at least she didn’t have to spend her birthday dinner with the Cosby’s.