Camdenshire Crumble Pie

I have zero skills in the kitchen. While I've had some experience with feasting, my preparation of meals usually involves frozen dinners and a microwave -- or a phone call for pizza.

So, when my department decided to have a bake sale as a means to raise funds toward a toy drive during one holiday season, I knew what I had to do. I bought a frozen apple pie and put it in the oven, carefully reviewing the necessary temperature and suggested time.

I placed the completed dessert on the floorboard of my car and drove it to the office, held it with reverence on the elevator, and provided polite courtesy laughter to all the small-talkers in the hallway who offered to "help eat the pie."

Then, while trying to balance the pie and position my ID for the badge reader to enter my office area, the pie tin folded like a taco.

Yep.

The previously inviting, flaky crust was now a crumbled engineering disaster.

While everyone was setting out the results of their late-night labors, I smuggled the pie into my office. How was I going to face everyone? And the answer revealed itself to me in a dastardly vision.

I whipped up a sign to imply that my pie was exotic and unusual and not at all the wreckage of a fumbling dork whose talents in the culinary arts are nil.


Camdenshire Crumble Pie
In smaller writing beneath it, I added the word apple, as though to suggest it came in many varieties.  It was the talk of the bake sale.  I explained that Camdenshire Crumble Pie first appeared in America in communities along the eastern shore of the Hudson River in 1823.