I need help. No, I need you to come to my house and stand in my kitchen while I make pie crust! But in the event that is not possible :-), I need help. I LOVE the detailed instructions and photos of your pie crust, and I was certain that this time I was going to knock out a perfect pastry. Two subs I made: * I didn't have pastry flour, so I used 1/2 KAF All Purpose white and half Swans Down cake flour. This was a tip I found a few places online for replicating pastry flour. * Actually, I replaced 2 T of the cake flour mentioned above with powdered sugar Did these mess me up? Aside from those I followed your recipe to the letter, making sure everything was very cold. My crust turned out "flat" rather than flaky. It was OK, nothing to brag about, too salty so next time I'd reduce the salt, but unimpressive. (I make a killer apple pie filling, so no problem there!) A few other observations: - I tried hard to get the visible butter that show in your photos both before and after rolling it out. The butter disappeared, though. I did use half butter/half shortening, and the shortening wasn't cold. Was that a problem? - I was making a 9" deep dish double crust. I rolled the pastry out to 12". - Rolling a disc that large was a real challenge. First, it made the dough rather thin, which I would think overly flattens the butter. Secondly, the dough didn't roll out into a disc with nice edges. It continually wanted to "fray" or split on the edges and I needed to repair it. Thirdly, it took a lot of effort to roll, making me wonder whether the dough was too cold. In the end I had two crusts that were just barely large enough to cover the inside of the pan and cover the top of the pie. I struggled to get the discs that large and definitely couldn't have gone bigger. Do these details help you know what I've done wrong? Any advice for next time? Tank you, jb

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