Saturday, February 14, 2009

Valentine's Day

I couldn't get Toll House Pie out of my head, so on Saturday I decided to bake my own pie. I have no idea where I originally got this recipe, so I can't properly give the source credit. But here's the recipe I have had in my palm pilot for several years now:

Toll House Pie

Ingredients:

2 eggs
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup butter, melted and cooled
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch single crust pie

Directions:

1 Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C)

2 In a large bowl, beat the eggs until foamy. Add the flour, white sugar and brown sugar; beat until well blended. Blend in the melted butter. Stir in the chocolate chips and walnuts. Pour batter into one unbaked 9 inch pie shell.

3 Bake at 325 degrees F (165 degrees C) for 1 hour. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream, if desired.

Recipes are only suggestions for me. This is probably why I am not a good baker since I don't treat recipes as an exact science. I like to change things up as I feel like it and add approximate amounts by eye. So for this pie, I didn't have walnuts, but I had mixed nuts. So I chopped those up to put in the pie, but I thought a cup sounded like too many nuts to me, so I used less. And 1 cup of chocolate chips sounded like too little since I had a whole bag, so in went the whole bag. I also used whole wheat flour, and I didn't seem to notice that it made too much of a difference. I used all of the one cup of melted butter and felt very guilty about it as I poured the whole cup into the batter. I cheated on the pie crust and used a ready made crust. I highly recommend serving this dessert with ice cream. The version of pie I made would probably be better named Butter, Chocolate and Nuts pie.

Michael went on a dump run on Saturday morning and came home with a dozen roses. I got him 3 new work shirts for Valentine's Day, the washer and dryer safe kind that are supposedly wrinkle free. We both had our little cherub as our special Valentine this year. I made a special dinner for Valentine's Day: steak Florentine, shrimp cocktail and asparagus. And of course, Butter, Chocolate and Nuts pie. It was a quiet holiday for us.

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