The birthday was a success. The pie, not so much.

The girls helped me fill 48 balloons for the birthday girl.

Possibly inhaling helium here and there.

I went back and forth on a banana cream pie recipe. I love watching Bon Appetit’s From the Test Kitchen Series. One of the chefs Chris does a segment called Reverse Engineering. The premise is… a fellow chef picks a recipe, I’ll use Gordon Ramsey’s Beef Wellington for an example. Chris gets to taste and touch the original dish but he’s blindfolded. Once he has an idea of what it is, he sets off to the store to grab the ingredients to make it. Back at the kitchen he attempts the first run, then he grades himself. He gets another stab at it, tasting the original, goes back to the store, yada yada yada. His third attempt is his final result. The chef that challenged him comes and compares the two dishes. Overall he does very well and it’s fun and I enjoy watching this experiment. Why did I explain all of this to you, well I chose his banana cream pie recipe. I figured his magnificent palate wouldn’t steer me wrong. His recipe had a twist on the original graham cracker crust recipe, he threw some salted peanuts to the mix. I decided to go for it, why not, peanut butter and banana goooooood. That was my first mistake. The peanuts completely over powered any graham cracker flavor. Good, yes, what I wanted, no. My second mistake was that the bananas weren’t ripe enough. I knew this while I was making it, the bananas weren’t banana-ee enough. I stood in the kitchen contemplating adding a little banana pudding mix to the vanilla pudding I had just made from scratch, then decided against it, that was my final mistake. Anyway, the end result was fine, did it taste like banana cream pie, no, did I love it? Also no. So, now we have a pie in the fridge that will most likely meet its demise in the trash later.

What lesson did I learn? Always trust your instincts!

Goes to show, just because I like a cooking show, doesn’t mean I will like the shows results.

I leave you with this absolutely amazing video. I die laughing every time I see it.