Mutiny on the HMS Hostess

Who would've thought such a simple device could cause such trouble?

As my few readers have no doubt noticed, thus far I have posted recipes that have been considered more or less successful. Even in the instances where the finished product was not something I was looking for, the experience was informative and it ultimately brings me a greater understanding of the product I *do* want. Well, lest you all think that my kitchen is a wonderland of magical materials that render ever attempt perfect, I present what is quite possibly the greatest culinary disaster my kitchen has ever seen: pocket pies.

As a child, I grew up gorging myself on Hostess products, just as my father had before me and so on through generations. The passing down of the Hostess craving was something of a time-honored tradition in our family, and I often found I could make a meal out of nothing more than 2-3 of their handheld fruit pies. (Yes, one would be enough, but one wants a little variety in a meal!) Naturally, as my metabolism has slowed and my fat reserves grown, I have thankfully steered myself out of the fast lane towards diabetes and back towards more conservative eating habits (my lingering bulk notwithstanding). However, when I discovered an episode of Good Eats dedicated solely to reproducing these little delicacies from my youth, there was little doubt in my mind that I would have to at least attempt the recipe and simply hope that I could bring the things into work and thereby spread the guilt joy amongst my coworkers instead.

Be not ye fooled; the photo at the top of this post, if you haven't guessed already, is most certainly not the end result of this experiment. Indeed, this recipe has convinced me that as gods were those who created the Hostess fruit pie, for it is certainly beyond my mortal abilities to recreate my beloved confection. Perhaps this is for the best, as my experience with this recipe has not only convinced me to halt any pie pastry-related endeavors in my near future, but it may have also soured me to the Hostess products I had once adored. Read on, my faithful viewers, and behold the horrific tale that unfolds.

Chocolate-filled Pocket Pies
Recipes adapted from various sources, as listed in each section below.

Pastry Dough:
Recipe appropriated from Laylita's Recipes
3c flour
1/2c sugar
Pinch of salt
2 eggs
8 tbsp butter
8 tbsp shortening
2-4 tbsp cold water

1) Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl with a fork or whisk until well mixed.

2) Add the butter, eggs, and water and mix until a dough forms.

Funny note: From the looks of things (and upon reflection), I don't think I added the damned eggs!

3) Form the dough into a large mound and flatten out somewhat. Refrigerate the lump for around 30 minutes.

This is what it looked like *before* entering the fridge... However, I let it sit overnight out of laziness.

... yes, there's more to Laylita's recipe, and no, I didn't get there. Due to a combination of complications (including the lack of eggs I mentioned above... damn it), the dough came out of the fridge a powdery mess that refused to coalesce back into the lump shown above. Now, after much reflection, I came up with several reasons for this:

a) Too much sugar in the dough: adding too much sugar can cause the sugar to lay claim to water intended for the flour, thus leaving the flour to be a powdery mess.
b) Too much time in the fridge: combined with the excessive sugar, the extra time simply allowed the sugar to mug the flour particles for their water for an extended period.
c) Lack of eggs: Obviously, the eggs would help as both a binder and a liquifier. With this revelation in hand, the dough recipe might actually be worth trying again sometime. Sometime later.

Regardless of the reasons behind it, I threw out the dough, as I was tired of fighting with it. I decided to roll back to the original recipe's dough instead. But in the meantime, I decided to create the chocolate goo that I was going to fill my pastries with. After all, it's chocolate filling--I couldn't possibly screw it up!

Chocolate Filling:
Recipe appropriated from Good Eats
2.5c sugar
1/4c + 1tbsp cocoa powder
1/4tsp salt
10oz butter

1) Dump the sugar, powder, and salt into a zip-top bag and shake vigorously.

At this point, my shaking was most vigorous, as I was already in a mood.

2) Add the butter to the bag and squish the crap out of it.

Squishing is also a good activity when frustrated.

While this recipe looks fairly innocent, it actually ends up being a huge pain simply because it takes a hell of a lot of squishing to get a uniform distribution between that much butter and that much not-butter! Nonetheless, this was obviously the more pleasant portion of my experiment. Since I did my squishing immediately after placing my pastry dough in the fridge, I refrigerated it until I was ready to pipe it out. Note that if refrigerated, this stuff needs to sit out to return to room temperature before it's easy to pipe out of the bag. So, now that that's taken care of, we can move onto the final portion of this god-forsaken recipe--my second batch (grr...) of dough.

Pastry Dough (Second Incarnation):
Recipe appropriated from Good Eats
2c flour
2tsp baking powder
3/4tsp salt
6tbsp shortening
3/4c milk
1 egg mixed with 1tsp of water (for sealing)

Preheat oven to 350F

I should note that while preparing this dough, I was already irritated with my previous experience, and as such, was not necessarily planning on publishing the recipe. Thus, I didn't take any pictures until the end. I'll have to try to fill in the blanks with my masterful wordsmithing instead.

1) Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl with a fork or whisk. The recipe calls for a food processor, but I really don't see the need at this point, and I don't own one anyway.

2) Knead the shortening into the mixture with your hands until it is crumbly, much like when making a pie dough.

I think the thought "pie dough" is what screwed me up with the first recipe; I never add eggs to pie dough, so I didn't think about it when I blindly omittted them.

3) Add the milk and mix it in with a spatula until the dough comes together. Note that since this isn't actually going to be a pie crust, you don't need to worry about overmixing the dough as excess gluten will not hurt the end texture here.

4) Lightly flour the countertop and your hands and slam the dough onto it. Flour the top of the dough as well.

5) Roll out the dough until it is about 1/3 of an inch thick. I strongly suspect I rolled mine out too thin--yet another bad omen.

6) Cut out rounds of the dough with a biscuit cutter (or other ring approximately 2 inches in diameter). Re-roll the dough as many times as necessary after cutting rounds out of it.

7) Roll each round out slightly to make it ovular in shape and pipe out a small blob of the chocolate filling into each one. Note that this step can (and probably should) be performed one round at a time, rather than all of them at once.

8) Brush the egg mixture across one side of the oval using the tip of a finger or pastry brush.

9) Fold the dough over and try to press out any excess air.

10) Use the tines of a fork to crimp the edges of the pastry and to pierce some ventilation holes in the top of the pie.

11) Repeat steps 7-10 for all the pastry rounds. Place the finished pastries on a baking sheet and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Seems relatively straightforward, if a little long in the steps, right? Well, here we are:

Stupid pies.

As you can see, I took the liberty of placing the damned things on a wire rack, as I figured that would provide better ventilation around all sides of the pie. Even though it would *probably* leave wire rack indentations on the pies themselves, I could live with that. Right? Ha! I bet these things exploded after the first minute, and spent the rest of the baking time laughing at me for my audacity.

Lessons learned:
That I probably won't be trying this again for the time being? I can't say never, as I'll give them another shot at some point, but certainly not for now. Perhaps the best lesson to take out of this is that $1 for a Hostess pie suddenly seems a lot more reasonable.