My adventures baking pie started in the summer, when I made my very first pie: Chocolate Pie. This was a good starter in some senses, because the crust was a simple Graham Cracker crust. Plus it has chocolate, and not only do I love chocolate, I was preparing it for the wake of my friend Dan, a budding chocolate maker. If I remember correctly I actually prepared the crust and filling the day before, since the filling needs to be refrigerated overnight.

The main thing to be careful about while preparing the filling is to not scorch the milk/cream mixture, so watch it carefully. You should also have all your ingredients ready and waiting, since things will happen quickly. Also, don't skimp on the quality of the chocolate.
So far so good right? I left it over night and the next morning it was nice and set. Unfortunately this is where things went awry. I woke up the next morning with a really terrible migraine, as if my subconscious just didn't want to leave the house, and I actually felt kind of ill. I persevered and tried to make the whip topping. My kitchen is pretty low tech kitchen, so even though I love cooking and baking, I actually do not own a handheld or stand mixer, and this recipe called for stiff peaks. If I'd ever tried to whip cream before I probably would have realised that this was a bad idea, but I was innocent. This is what happens if you keep trying to whip cream and you're not whipping fast enough and end up over-whipping it: it starts to separate. Incidentally, I think I could have just kept whipping and ended up with two products: buttermilk and butter.
Not pretty. So I threw that out in frustration, took some more aspirin, and made a supermarket run for some more heavy cream. Before I left I put my blender in the freezer (when whipping cream, you should put the bowl and whisks in the freezer before using them). This time I just threw the cream in the blender and gave up on true stiff peaks or trying to whip the cream by hand. It tasted really good, but it never occurred to me that serving this at an outdoor event on a hot summer day with no ready access to a fridge to store it in the interim might be a bad idea...so all in all, the wrong dessert for this function. Luckily I'd also made mini blueberry zucchini breads, which disappeared like hotcakes.