Pieing in Quarantine

Hello again, reader(s), and welcome to my quarantine kitchen.

Just kidding, I'm not really in quarantine, being one of the fortunate few who are considered "essential" workers but whose jobs, in theory at least, entail relatively little COVID-19 exposure risk. So needless to say, I haven't been spending a lot of time perfecting my pie game and my Zoom background while children rampage within earshot (cocktail hour, falling somewhere on a loose spectrum from 6PM to 9PM, on the other hand...). But Mad Scientist Husband has been doing the grocery shopping lately, and we have...ingredients.

When you're a gourmand who can't go out to eat anymore and life hands you breakfast cereals, amirite?

I present to you the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Pie (was going to make trademark joke but can't find proper formatting so bleh). The template for said pie is my go-to key lime pie from Smitten Kitchen, which is about as no-fail as any pie can get in my chaotic paws. It only gets more, uh, fail-proof from there. Yeah. This totally looks like a great idea. For those of you playing along at home, I hope you're real bored.

You start with a box of Lucky Charms.

And now you separate about 2 cups of Lucky Charms into cereal and marshmallows.

Keep the marshmallows for later...if you can stop eating them. They don't taste or feel like marshmallows, but they go in the mouth real easy. Also what is this misshapen unicorn head thing?

Preheat your oven to 350F. I always forget this part and then start swearing when the oven isn't ready and my ingredients are.

Take out your aggressions on the cereal. You want a coarse crumb akin to graham cracker. Dump these in a large mixing bowl with a couple teaspoons of sugar and a pinch of salt. Melt about 6 tablespoons of butter and stir into the crumbs until evenly coated and loosely coalescent. Dump into the bottom of a 9-inch pie plate and work into a thin layer on the bottom and sides like you would a graham cracker crust.

Bake your crust for approximately 10-15 minutes until golden brown. If you did it wrong like me and ended up with too much butter to crumbs, you will end up with a sort of bubbling caramel layer. That's OK. Take that hot mess out of the oven (leave the oven on for the pie) and let it set a bit as it cools.

To a large mixing bowl or stand mixer, add 3 large egg yolks and whisk by hand or on high speed until pale and ribbony. Dump in a 14-ounce can of condensed milk and whisk some more until combined and creamy. Then dump in somewhere around 2/3 to 3/4 cup orange juice (whatever kind you have on hand--we have Tropicana with pulp, I think?) and whisk some more until combined and creamy but hopefully before it gets super bubbly or else you should really consider letting the bubbles settle before you dump it in your pie crust. Tasting note: orange creamsicle? We really hoped that flavor would stick around in the final product.

Dump your filling into your pie crust. If your crust is a little fragile and overbuttered like mine you may have some floaters and grease slicks. That's fine, bake it anyway, no one will know.

Bake in that same 350F oven about 15-20 minutes until the filling sets. We had some browning at the edges but that's because we had to bake a bit longer due to rogue butter keeping the custard liquid.

Remove from oven and allow to cool completely. Refrigeration helps here. I highly recommend it.

Whip about 3/4 cup heavy cream (unsweetened is the way to go here, you'll soon see why!) to soft peaks. Pull out your cooled pie, spread the cream over the top, and top (in a careful spiral pattern for maximum coverage) with the marshmallows you set aside earlier.

This pie can be served as is, which we did. Mad Scientist Husband claims the crust tastes like BJ's pizzookie. I have never eaten at BJ's so cannot corroborate.

It's better after a day or so in the fridge. The marshmallows...reconstitute??? And the texture gets malty like cereal milk. The slight orange tang gets overpowered by the pizzookie crust while fresh but when leftover takes on a Froot Loop character.

Is it amazing? Well, no. But when life hands you General Mills...