The (In)famous Cthulhu Pie !

This is an outtake from Cooking With Lovecraft: Supernatural Horror In The Kitchen by Miguel Fliguer, available in paperback and Kindle here.

Ask a thousand aficionados who have spent ten minutes around Lovecraft online social forums, and their answer will be the same. Yes, they have seen the meme, many times. The picture of a blueberry pie with a top crust purportedly shewing the visage of Cthulhu, its vaguely batrachian face sprouting tentacles all over. Two excrescences in place of eyes, a whole berry inside each one, complete the dramatic effect.



American illustrator Sandy Yoo originally created the pie in 2013. The inspiration came from her young son, who had been reading Lovecraft and was clearly in the mood for an eldritch dessert. Sandy’s website (alas, now defunct) used to have the complete story and several links to featured articles on the memetic pie, which by this time has a life of its own. Luckily, Sandy preserved the original video recipe here, so you might check it out if you want to replicate the original non-euclidean dough horror.

My version, however, mashes her concept with the traditional Latin American “pasta frola”, a shortbread pie filled with quince paste and topped with a lattice crust. Keep reading and learn how to replace the lattice with some serious eldritch pastry.

I made a crude hand drawing of a winged, six-eyed octopoid –actually, a pentopoid– and took its picture. Then used the image as background on a Powerpoint slide, traced a nicer version on top with the Arch tool, scaled the picture for A4 paper size and printed 2 slides, one with the final aspect for reference, and another with deconstructed shapes –body and wings– for tracing over the dough.

Here is my final template. Use it as a springboard for your own ideas… because Cthulhu speaks to each of us differently in our dreams, and each of us has unique perceptions of His visage.



Now, the pie construction.

Ingredients
- 125 g butter
- 180 g sugar
- 250 g self-rising flour
- 1 egg + 1 yolk (for dough)
- 1 egg white (for eggwash)
- 1 orange (for juice and zest)
- 500 g quince paste
- Optional : 1 shot glass of sweet white / port wine

Wear your Sabbath-best cultist apron. In a bowl, mash butter at room temperature with the sugar, then add the egg, the yolk, finely grated zest from half the orange, and mix everything until it looks creamy. Add ¾ of the flour, kneading by hand and adding the rest of the flour gradually until you get a smooth dough. Sprinkle some flour on top and around, cover the bowl with a dishcloth and let it sleep, dreaming undead in the fridge until the stars are right or 30 minutes have passed, whichever occurs first.

Preheat oven at 300°F. In a deep microwave-safe dish, mash the quince paste with the filtered juice of the orange, using a fork. Optionally, replace the orange juice with a little sweet white wine. Cover with a flat dish and nuke at half-power for 30 seconds. Mash with the fork and nuke again for 30 seconds. It should now look like a thick red cream, but if there are still though bits, repeat the nuking one more time. Let it cool while the dough is resting. Alternatively, you can soften the quince paste on the stove at low heat instead of the microwave.

Reserve 1/3 of the dough. On a lightly floured surface, roll 2/3 of the dough until evenly flat and 3 mm thick. Butter and flour the bottom and sides of a 12” round pie dish. Lay the dough on the bottom of the dish and build the crust. It will crack fairly easily but that’s easy to fix. Fill the crust with the softened quince paste, making it as level as possible.

Now the tricky part begins.

Over a floured plastic bag, roll the reserved 1/3 of the dough until evenly flat and 3 mm thick. Thinner would be better, but makes it harder to handle without cracking.

Cut the paper templates, put them on top of the dough, and carefully trace the figures with a pointy knife. Don’t worry if you break a tentacle, you can fix it later. See next two pictures, they may look a bit clumsy but who cares, right? Right.



Repeat with the wings, making them a bit larger than the template. Arrange the wings over the filling. Roll thin strips of dough for the wing details (see picture below). Use the paper template as a reference to place the wings.



Of course, wings are simple shapes and they should separate from the plastic without breaking. The tentacles… different story. Remove the paper from the pie (duh!), position the dough head on top of the pie and carefully unroll the plastic from underneath the traced shape, trying to get everything in one piece and –hopefully– in the right place. If it ends a bit off like in my attempt, just leave it there, because the shape will instantly stick to the filling, and moving it around is out of the question. Another way to do it is just flip everything –dough and plastic– on top of the filling and hoping for the best.

Fix any cracks that may have appeared, and smooth the edges of the shapes with a knife. Roll very thin strips of dough for those unholy details around the eyes.

Looking good, Old One!



You might remember eons ago –when we started making this pie– we used an egg plus one yolk. Beat the leftover egg white with a little water, and brush the eggwash all over the pie (crust and filling) until nicely glazed.

The oven should be on the low-medium range when you send in the pie on the middle rack. After 15-20 minutes, raise the temperature a bit and start checking every two minutes. When it begins to golden, turn off the oven. Test the edges of the pie with a toothpick for doneness. Leave it a couple of minutes in the oven if needed. Then take it out and let it rest for about an hour before eating.

The result is a Wilcoxian nightmare. I present you, The Horror In Dough:



Every part of it looks wider after baking, of course. But making thinner tentacles is no easy task. One possibility would be to roll them separately from the head, and place them one by one over the filling. Thinner means more, longer tentacles for the same area, which seems nice but I don’t think it’s worth the effort. If you make it, let me know!



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