Lemon custard, pie crust cookies

A friend gave me this. 

It's the sort of thing I can make myself easily with items I keep on hand but I seldom have a use for such a thing. The last time was to fill beignets. Plus I can make it better. Plus it's fun. It confuses me but I encourage gift-giving to me, but I'm having trouble steering that activity towards things that I cannot afford myself. I need to work on that.

For now, what to do, what to do. People make pies out of lemon custard. I think people smear it on biscuits. 

Butter and coconut oil, two types of saturated fat solid at room temperature if the room isn't so hot, one fat animal, the other fat vegetable. 

The weight of the marble pin makes rolling a cold sturdy dough a lot easier. The chill on the marble helps keep the fats solid. Each little speck of fat becomes a flake. The dough rolled out and folded several times creates layers of flakes. That's the idea.

The pin has a knitted cotton cover, and the work surface has a cloth rolling cover. Those two things, pin cover and rolling cloth that are kept dusted with flour make rolling and folding easier. 

The pin also has a marble slab to keep dough cold while rolling it out but the slab is too heavy to mess with and the rubber feet make it a better serving tray than a rolling surface. 

The pie crust dough is flavored with 

* brown sugar and a 

* tiny amount of salt because flour needs salt. And then

* cinnamon. I channeled my inner Canadian and used half as much cinnamon as my inner American insisted on using. Then a teeny-tiny microscopic pinch of

* clove powder, about five molecules. I counted them. It's hard to count clove molecules because they keep flying around. And 

* allspice because I'm too lazy to grind nutmeg right now and

* ginger powder, just a trace. I'm using ginger with sweet things the same way I use garlic for savory things. It's something fierce that can add a mysterious quality to something or completely destroy it. I've held a childhood bias against ginger snaps. They seem like a terrible biscuit for children, way too harsh. A box of those could safely be kept around our house indefinitely, there were only two people in our house who liked those things and they weren't kids. 

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