Easy as pie

My mom usually starts baking for Thanksgiving early Wednesday so that she has plenty of oven space for the turkey, dressing, and mac and cheese that take up most of her oven cooking time. I thought I would help out this year by making a pie.

I love to bake and make lots of cupcakes, cakes, cookies, muffins, breads, etc but I have NEVER made a pie from scratch. How hard could it be? I know how to bake. Could a pie with homemade crust really be that hard? I researched Thanksgiving pie recipes on foodnetwork.com and came across the maple pumpkin pie with pecan streusel. It was described as the 'must serve' Thanksgiving pie as it combines pumpkin and pecans into one pie and it had an 'easy' difficulty rating...sounds like a winner to me.

I called my mom around 11:30am to tell her that Maison and I would be by for a short visit after her nap, as I was going to surprise her with my fab pie. Let's just say 'easy' has a whole new meaning...

Nothing is fast about homemade crust. I got the dough mixed together in minutes but didn't realize that it had to rest for at least 30 minutes before I could use it. Then I noticed the recipe called for toasting the pecans before making the streusel. Uh, how do you toast pecans? I seriously had to google it. Then I struggled to get the dough to go over the fluted edges of my Emile Henry pie pan. It seemed every time I covered one side the other side slipped down. Ok, so maybe I wouldn't be dropping off the pie shortly after Mais's nap.

This easy pie had a million steps and literally took me all day to make. I believe it was close to 7pm when I finally left to drop the pie off. It was already dark and Adam was already home from work so I made him drive me. I did not want anything happening to this pie on the way to Nooey's house. I sure hope it tastes as good as it looks and was worth a whole days work!