Life of Pie: Part Three

Here’s what happened.

We baked a pie, and we zipped up the recipe a bit — brown sugar, butter, a courageous dash of maple extract. We had twelve hours in which to create two masterpieces, and so we baked like we’d never baked before… I mean, literally, we’d never baked this particular recipe, ever. No one had. It came right out of our heads, just beautiful creativity flowing out of our minds and into the pie dish and straight into the oven. It was pure pie magic, people!

Pure pie magic!

And the next morning, we dropped off our two apple-maple pies — both untasted, both untested — and set up our display with the kind of slapdash, devil-may-care freedom one sees in children’s playgrounds or James Joyce novels. We were just throwing our soul all out there, never letting doubt trip us, shouting into the void “who gives a damn what anyone thinks!” Our pie display was stream-of-consciousness. It was the truth.

The contest was, as always, absolutely wonderful because this village knows how to rock a pie contest. Eighteen entries, four judges, a singalong, and much tasting. Now, as I said earlier, we made two pies: one for tasting, and one for the pie auction afterwards, with all proceeds donated to the Cumberland Community Forest Society. Let me tell you, we didn’t win a single thing, but that wasn’t surprising; there’s a lot of pride in winning here, as well as a small army of creative bakers who live in this small town. What surprised us was the auction…. our humble little maple-apple pie was the last to be auctioned, and it caused a little stir of a bidding war, and ended up selling for $80.

Yowzah!

I hope the next round of pies we bake, for next week’s Thanksgiving feast, is as successful as yesterdays. Can’t wait to get baking!