This weekend marked the American Pie Council’s Annual Pie Festival and Competition in Celebration, Florida. Every year the council holds a festival complete with a never-ending pie buffet, pie eating contest and pie competition; along with cooking demonstrations and other entertainment. This year I went down there to be a judge in the amateur pie competition, and I got to eat pie all day.

 

The competition lasts 3 days. The first day consists of commercial pies like the ones you might order online and buy at the grocery store. It also includes the pies that companies sell to restaurants. The second day was the amateur pies and the third day was professional and the kids division. I went down for the second day of judging for the amateur pies. But before I start telling you more about the competition, let me quickly explain how and why I did this.

 

Last year, my roommate and I were watching the Food Network when we saw the pie competition. We wondered how those people got to be judges and eat pie all day so we Googled it. We found the website and a link for applications for the 2007 competition. We thought it would be fun to apply but didn’t take it too seriously. Then over our last Thanksgiving break I remembered the competition because I had bookmarked the page on my internet browser. I decided to fill out an application and see what would happen. The only problem, I don’t know anything about pies. The closest I’ve come to baking is mixing water with the Betty Crocker brownies. But I thought, what the hell, they probably won’t accept me anyway. So I faxed in the application expecting to never think about it again. Well that’s exactly what happened. Months went by and I had completely forgotten about it. But then one day an email appeared in my mailbox about Saturday Pie Judging. Confused, I opened it only to find out that they had actually accepted my application! I quickly freaked out with excitement and went to check all of my class syllabuses to make sure I had no conflicts.  Nothing seemed to be that conflicting so I started looking for flights and a hotel. Eventually I found a good flight at a cheap price and booked a room at the hotel where the competition would be held. Now all I had to do was wait.

 

When the competition started getting closer, I started getting a little more nervous. Not only did I not know anything about pies or baking, but I also made things up on my application. I told the council that I was part of a factitious club called “UD Bakers”. Maybe this club actually exists on campus, but if it does I’m not part of it. Anyways I said the club got together each week with a different baked good or desert as the focus. Everyone would bring in their own item and recipe and we would taste them all, share the recipes/tips and then have a blind taste test to determine who had the best brownies/cupcakes/pie/cake etc. of that week. Okay, so I wasn’t being completely honest here, but I really wanted to eat all that pie! Anyways I decided that I could just try to make up anything I might have to know. I even started researching pie baking on the internet, but quickly got distracted by other things, so needless to say, I didn’t learn a lot.    continue >>