Now that I’ve started hanging out on more and more blogs, I’m a little jealous of the photography skills on some of them. Everyone has artistic lighting and interesting compositions. Adam’s a great photographer, I love seeing his point of view. I’ve taken several photography classes in my time, so I’m used to this feeling. Students in my classes would have technically brilliant photos with some complicated angles happening, like a skateboarder sailing over their head. Mine would be the one with dust marks from the negative and it would be slightly out of focus, and it would be a picture of 2 guys whitewashing a wall. I’m almost strictly a documentarian when I take a picture. Usually I see someone doing something interesting and I want to catalog the moment to use later in a painting or project. Sometimes I stumble onto an incredible picture, but it’s usually entirely accidental. So that’s my approach. Point the camera and hope for the best. Nothing fancy, just telling it like It Is. Unfortunately, sometimes It Is out of focus.
Today was kind of a bad day. One of those days where nothing big goes wrong but every possible little thing does. To distract myself, I went to my friend Elizabeth’s blog and saw her latest cooking experiment–Margarita Cookies! The recipe came from Smitten Kitchen, a blog that’s new to me (there are so many out there to conquer on so many different topics). So I went straight to Smitten Kitchen in search of something to cheer myself up with tonight, and there it was on the front page: S’Mores Pie! It looked incredible, so I worked on it as soon as I got home. I cannot tell you how giddy I was to make marshmallow from scratch. I haven’t made a pie since I was a kid, but after a Christmas obsession with the movie Waitress I kept thinking I should become a pie person. This was my chance. It was pretty easy but required a lot of cooling time at various stages, so we didn’t actually eat it until after 10pm.
While it didn’t have the same eyes-widening impact on Adam as the Triple Chocolate Peppermint Trifle or Grant’s Brownies (both of which I’m sure I will write about someday), it was pretty good. I made it with bittersweet chocolate, so it was a bit rich as Adam’s family would say. Next time maybe I would try milk chocolate. I also was a bit overzealous with my broiling of the top, which tasted like camp to me but tasted like burned marshmallows to Adam. Very different associations, Brits don’t really get s’mores.
Come to think of it, this pie is another example of nothing big going wrong today but lots of little things not going as planned. Really, the best part about this was playing with the marshmallow while I was making it. I should give it a Waitress-y pie name like Burn Today in Effigy Pie or something.
I did, however, learn the basics of making candy. Maybe instead of being a pie person I’ll become a candy person.
UPDATE 6/8/08: Here is the actual recipe: