I had no plans for this day. Does one even celebrate Friday the 13^th ? Isn’t Friday the 13^th something you normally try to ignore? I guess you can indulge with a slasher film but that seems so… redundant. However, I discovered that a sizeable enough number of people stay in bed to avoid all possible catastrophe on these days that sales go down by several hundreds of millions. Anything with that big an impact on the economy is a disorder so doctors put together every relevant foreign word they could think of and came up with:

friggatriskaidekaphobia

Got that? Now fear of Friday the 13^th is a genuine disease.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have it because as superstitious as I can be about certain things, I’ve never cared one way or the other about numbers, cracked mirrors or hockey masks. But wanting to mark the moment in some way made me think of food and of course that led to baking and then a search for some kind gruesome looking components with a small side line search for someone to give the baked goods to since we just rid the house of cupcakes and still have some brownies hanging around.

Problem 1. What to make.

A very short internet search led me to some truly appalling foods. Vienna sausages shouldn’t “float” in anything, no one should spend any time peeling grapes and when you fill dates with cream cheese and chopped walnuts and call them “roasted cockroaches” I put my foot down. Disgusting. Clever but disgusting.

But pie is fun. Piecrust can be manipulated and fillings can be bloody red strawberries or cherries.  We have a friend with a birthday on the 13th and another with a new baby so now we can make two pies and get rid of them, which solves problem 2. And if I make a Friday the 13^th reference on the pie somehow, then I can take a picture and post it here and all problems are solved! Plus strawberries look really good right now.

This is how my sister and I ended up throwing a pie making party  with some friends drinking gin and tonics, lending the occasional hand and contributing the sparkling social element. During the afternoon somehow the pies doubled themselves (4 pies?? What happened!?)

 2 strawberry rhubarb, a cherry and a strawberry. So now we have two pies that will stay here (No! No! No!!), which negates solution 2.

My idea was to write “Friday” in the top of the cherry pie and “the 13^th” in the top of the strawberry pie. Ham fisted? Perhaps. But challenging. I had visions of fruit juice gently bubbling out of the cunningly cut little letters, easily readable by all and giving everyone a little laugh.

Oh Kaitlyn. You’re hilarious.

Also, I do believe the phrase “how hard can it be?” crossed my mind, which just shows that I learned nothing from stroked out Darth Vader and his cadre of cupcake friends.

Nevertheless, I rolled up my sleeves and started sketching letters on piecrust. But just as I started to cut, my sister looked over my shoulder and said “You know you can’t do it that way.” She reminded me that the piecrust is rolled out on paper and needs to be flipped over onto the pie; so, either I cut the letters out while it’s on the pie (D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R) or I cut them out backwards so it reads forwards when it’s flipped. Backwards letters in a piece of piecrust. What could be easier?

Ergo and forthwith the successful first pie:

The second pie was less successful when I realized the 3 looked like… a 3. Surgery, patting, recutting, reconstituting and then we had:

Wait a minute… the 1 is… BACKWARDS!

!@)(*$@#Y!

Too late now. I’ll just pretend it’s the influence of my 6 year old niece and her creative writing.

I shoved everything in the oven and took it out nearly an hour later:

What. In. The. Hell. Happened. Here.

You’ll note that the Friday pie is neatly contained but I think the 13^th pie went through battle in the oven while I wasn’t looking.

My sister looked at the steaming red pile, raised her (newly plucked) eyebrows and said “Well, it looks bloody. Isn’t that what you were going for?”

Truth.

Happy (?) Friday the 13^th.