Two in a row - Cinnamon Pie - Week #17

Do you want to know what isn't fun? I am sure you can think of tons of things, but I can tell you this. Making inedible pies that ended up being consumed by the garbage disposal for the the past two weeks makes my short list. I actually think that this week's debacle might have been worse than last week.  I have stated here, at least once, that pie makes people happy.  I can attest, without reservation, that bad pie can make someone absolutely miserable.  In particular, making and then eating horrendous pie has made me miserable.  In the interest of attempting to learn from my mistakes, I claim to have learned (or confirmed) several important things over the last few weeks:

1. I am not spontaneous.  I am a planner -- not necessarily a good planner, but a planner nonetheless.  When I don't plan and I do things on the spur of the moment (for example, selecting -- or making -- a pie) they seldom turn out well
   
2. If you are going to make a good pie, you have to pick a good recipe.
   
3. I think I am officially in The Dip - anyone who has read it...  time to make a decision.
   

Suffice it to say, I have failed on several levels the past two weeks.  If I am to continue with this exercise, I am going to have to learn something from these failures.  If I am to commence with traveling through the valley that I am currently in, I have to hope to come out the other side better in some tangible way for the effort.  More and more, my hope for this experience has less to do with pie making and more to do with this, the blogging/writing experience.  

So, despite the fact that I seldom seem to do the writing on time, and I seldom manage to write more than the bare minimum, I am going to try to change that going forward.  As of now, I am going to continue making pies, but how and when I write in this blog will likely change.  I probably won't be writing comprehensive pie baking reports most weeks.  I will continue to publicly select a flavor, and I will comment on some specifics.  I just don't plan to follow the heretofore subscribed to formula.  We shall see how that turns out.  But, it is a slightly new direction and I am anxious to see how it goes.

All right.  Enough with the whining already.  Maybe that can be the new poll question.  

Do you prefer...

• Blubbering, whiny rants about how hard it is to make a pie every week
  
• Conventional pie blogging
  
• Blogs written by people who think there is conventional pie blogging
  
• None of the above.  Write about how you screwed up this week already!
  

Having written all of that...  After two pretty mediocre weeks, I needed to vent, I suppose.  In a way, I suppose that is the beauty of the blog.  You can write whatever you want.  It is almost the very definition.  With great power, however, great responsibility...  You can not get it back.  Once it is published, it is out there to be read and you can't hit the delete key, retrieve it, or ask everyone to just ignore it.  With RSS aggregators being as prevalent as they are, you can't even hope that an erroneous blog entry can be deleted, never to be seen again.  Odds are, it has already been picked up by the Google Reader's and Bloglines of the 'net.  They have it, and it's irretrievable.

So, there it is.  My first blog that has little or nearly nothing to do with pie.  I have been wondering if I would be the only one ever to read it.  Apparently not, because I'm posting it in a minute.  I figure that if I had the courage/stupidity to make, and post about some of the awful pies of the past four months, why not go the next step and expose myself wallowing in depression at the current state of my experiment.

This is, however still called 52pies, so have a look at what a truly shitty pie looks like...

This recipe wasn't too awful, but no matter what it wouldn't have been a a good pie.  Underbaked, and executed like a disinterested bystander, which I was in many ways.

More of the weird crust bubbling behavior.

No separate post this week about flavor.  I am planning on making a lemon/raspberry pie this week.  I do not know every detail of what that will mean, but I will soon.