Wednesday, March 18, 2009

A Tale of Two (Key Lime) Pies.

One of the few things that I can't do (besides my taxes or sitting through and episode of Grey's Anatomy without vomitting) is bake. I cook really well on the burners, but the oven is like a mysterious dragon vagina that frightens and confuses me. Still, I love a challenge (and key lime pie) so I set out to bake one with the girlfriend so that we could relive the wonderful experience we had in Key West, but without the airports and tourists.

Since I'm lazy, I toyed with the idea of just making an instant pie, but I knew it would be better if I made a real one. How much better? Let's find out:



Okay, here is what you start with for the real key lime pie. Notice how small the key limes are? I thought "key lime" was the name of the pie, but it's actually the name of the sucky small limes that grow in key west. So here's the ingredients for the real key lime pie....or the mise en place, if you are a pretentious food snob.








And here's the ingredients for the fakey instant key lime pie.









And here is the mixer that you use. This is the GF's mixer. I don't have a mixer because I don't bake. A few months ago when the GF wanted to make a pizza was the first time since I've owned the fortress that I used the oven feature. The oven had never been cleaned either, so the first time I used it...things did not go so well.






Here is how you get the juice out of the key limes....well this way and a LOT of work.









As you can see, you need a lot of key limes for this.













All that work for this leeeetle bit of lime juice?










Here is the girlfriend mixing up the ingredients with her mixer..









After mixing, my sexy assistant pours the mixture into a pie tin and we throw it into the oven.










Meanwhile... for the "instant" pie...

The weird instant green goop has to be heated on a stovetop, which sort of defeats the purpose of a instant mix. If there is that much work involved, why not take an extra five minutes and make it the fresh way?









And here's a side by side of the finished products.










The real one tasted delicious. The fake one tasted like green slime from that Ghostbusters movie. After tasting the fake one, I literally through the rest of it away. And I followed the directions precisely, so it sucked for reals yo!








Here's a food porn shot of the pies and stuff.










Here I am washing the dishes with my powerful male arms.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, you can buy key lime juice that's already squeezed, right? :)

Shannon said...

I got as far as "dragon vagina" and froze up...what was this post about, anyhow?

Shannon said...

Not that a dragon couldn't have a vagina, just...I can't picture a vagina with hinges. Ew.

HomeImprovementNinja said...

Anon: Yes, I knew that, but I wanted to make a (mostly) from scratch one just once.

Shannon: Well, that's what I picture it as: a large hole that is hundreds of degrees farenheit.

Cyndy said...

I made my dad a key lime pie for Father's Day once back when I was in high school. I was very disappointed by the color of the authentic key lime juice so I added green food coloring to it. Then everyone thought I had made it with lime jello or something. But it still tasted really good, in spite of the artificial color.

Corey said...

My what powerful arms you have when you bake and do dishes. So manly.

HomeImprovementNinja said...

cyndy: yeah, when I tried it in key west, my first thouth was "why isn't it green?"

corey: i know, right!

rachaelgking said...

Oh, how I've missed real Key Lime pie... only ever had the real deal in Key West. I'm totally making this.