Another pie.

If you weren’t aware: Friday was National Pie Day. Yeah, I know, you probably had to go to the office anyway. It’s not FEDERAL HOLIDAY Pie Day.

Anyway, me being me and all, I figured that I’d better make a pie.

Someone I follow on Twitter wished that it was INTERnational Pie Day, so I thought it would be a good time to attempt the cà phê sữa đá pie that I’ve been kicking around in my head. Cà phê sữa đá is a Vietnamese espresso drink, made with condensed milk and served over ice.

Sweetened, condensed milk. Mmmmmmm. Doesn’t that just beg to be a pie?

The recipe was easy to figure out. The crust had me baffled for a bit, until I decided to go with a chocolate cookie crumb. Sort of a mocha sữa đá. 🙂

Okay, preheat the oven to 425° while I mix up the pie filling. Fill the pie crust, and pop it in the oven. 20 minutes in, decide that it’s smelling awfully near-done-ishy, and check my notes for my planned cook time. No, 40 minutes. Hmmm. 30 minutes in, decide that it’s really smelling done, and then realize that I’ve heated the oven to 425°. Yeah, that’s exactly what I set it to. 425°. Except, that’s not my PIE temperature, that’s my Puffy Pancake temperature! I bake PIE at 350°! Yikes! I pull the coffee-colored pie from the oven, but it’s a coffee-friggin’-pie in the first place, so I really have no idea how browned it is or isn’t. I whip up the merigue, top the pie, and put it back in the oven (at 350°) to finish it off.

Verdict: It’s not burned, but it is very caramelized. There is a LOT of sugar in condensed milk (44%) so this is now a sticky pie. Not corn syrup sticky, but sticky toffee pudding sticky. The flavor is pretty darn good, though. A pleasant espresso top note which quickly fades to the caramelized bottom end, but the caramel tastes neither burned nor “too” sweet. I couldn’t taste the chocolate cookie crust at all. When this one is polished off, I’ll try again, with the proper temperature. I think the recipe shows great promise!

Amy asked for pie photos, but here’s the deal. Most of my pies lately have been topped with meringue, so they all look the same. Here’s a random photo of one of my pies, and you can pretend it’s a photo of whichever one you wanted to see:

(Yeah, yeah, I know. I still need to redo the Creamsicle pie, too. I haven’t forgotten.)