Makes your eyes light up and your tummy say howdy
On Friday, the first grade at Caroline’s school had their very own Thanksgiving Feast. This is not to be confused with the feast they had in the cafeteria earlier in the week that involved very tough turkey and nary any sort of cutting utensil to be found.
The feast on Friday was just for the first graders and each class was asked to contribute various things. I’m the homeroom mom (I know. I can’t even believe it myself. Rumor has it I actually have to come up with some crafts for them to do at the Christmas party.) so I sent out an email to the parents in the class with a list of items we’d need for the feast.
Fortunately, we have really great parents and they quickly volunteered for everything we needed with the exception of pies. My co-homeroom mom and I agreed that we’d just take care of the pies so, when I picked up Caroline from school earlier in the week, I asked her what kind of pies she’d like me to make for the Thanksgiving Feast and she informed me that she’d like a cherry pie and a shoofly pie.
I’d only heard of a shoofly pie thanks to the musical stylings of the late Dinah Shore, but when I told Caroline I wasn’t sure how to make a shoofly pie she told me to “go look it up on the google”. I informed her that when I was her age the only way I could have found out how to make a shoofly pie would have involved something called an “Encyclopedia” because we didn’t have computers or “the google”. She said, “Yeah, but they didn’t even have electricity when you were little”.
I think she has the 1970’s confused with an episode of Little House on the Prairie.
Ultimately, I did indeed find a recipe for shoofly pie using Google, but decided that I didn’t have the time nor the inclination to make two homemade pies for a first grade Thanksgiving feast that was going to consist of some turkey roll-ups, chex party mix, and carrots with ranch dressing. So I went to Central Market and bought a chocolate cream pie from the bakery and this.

The night before the feast, I pulled it out of the freezer and began to open the box. Caroline walked in, noticed what I was doing and exclaimed, “Oh! So that’s how you make a homemade cherry pie!”
And I replied, “Yes. Yes it is.”
I just thought y’all might want my recipe.
Disclaimer: Dinah Shore never sang a song about Mrs. Callender’s frozen pies. But I think she totally would have if she’d ever tried one.