More Pie Failures

or Why You Should Never Bring Pie to a Picnic.
My birthday was last week and to celebrate I had a picnic with a bunch of friends in the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park this past weekend. It was a beautiful day for a picnic, plenty of people were out enjoying the gorgeous weather, but not too many to make it overcrowded. There were several children celebrating birthday's in the same area, including three legged races and water balloon fight. All in all an ideal picnic day and I asked everyone to bring something while I brought pie.

You'd think I would have learned my lesson from the last attempt to bring pie somewhere. Despite having a plastic pie saver so that I don't repeat the mess I had last year when taking a pie on the subway to a Newsies sing along on the Upper West Side where I ended up with pie juice dripping out of the pie dish all over me, my scarf, and the subway car, it's still inevitably a disaster whenever I try to take pie out of the safety of my apartment.
For the picnic I made two pies - Strawberry, Peaches and Cream pie and Three Berry Star Pie (Strawberry, Blackberry and Blueberry). I made both pies the night before thinking they'd have plenty of time to cool and be less liquidy the next morning. I tried making the crust dough in my food processor for the first time and as was my fear, when I wet to roll it out, the texture was off. I added eggs and milk and put the dough back in the fridge and was able to salvage the dough however so I thought things were looking up.

Three Berry Star Pie Before

Three Berry Star Pie After

This was the obvious problem of pie juice shifting during carrying. Not as big a mess as last time since the pie had cooled over night, but it still made for a tie dyed sort of pie look.

Sadly I don't have a before picture for the Peaches and Cream pie, but it was a lovely one crust pie with a brown sugar crumble topping. After pulling it out of the oven around midnight, I covered it with foil to protect it without thinking too much about it. It looked perfect. I was tired so I figured I would photograph it the next morning for the blog, but by morning the crumb topping had mostly melted into the rest of the pie. No matter, I thought, it would still taste good. Then when I unwrapped it at the picnic it had REALLY melted. I tasted it, but the texture was so funny that sadly this was one pie that just never got served.

On the plus side the salad I made with my CSA share partner for the picnic turned out fabulously including the roasted beets.