If you decide to bake the perfect apple pie, and you make your favorite pie crust recipe (the one that uses butter and vodka) and it rolls out in soft perfection, and you use those orchard-fresh Cortlands and your mother’s secret recipe involving heavy cream for the last 5 minutes of baking, and the pie emerges in splendor, golden brown, and you pack it up to take to a family dinner, and you serve it up in eager anticipation of the glowing compliments you are about to receive, and your grandson takes a bite, looks up startled, and says, “This has quite a kick!”, it just may that you grabbed the chili powder instead of the cinnamon. I wondered why I wasn’t getting a whiff of the usual spicy fragrance as it baked.
