Apple and plum pie Baked in my oven Sunday and made a big mess.
But the result sure was pretty even if I do have to clean the oven now where the pie bubbled over. Note to self: invest in a non stick liner that can be easily cleaned.
The sweet pie and the mini pie are both strawberry apple. The big pie has an almond crumb topping. The little one I tried to cut a pi into, but it didn't work out so well.
I made a cherry pie once. I vowed not to do it again until I had a cherry pitter as the last event had resulted in cherry juice all over my whole kitchen, self and dog.
For Chanukah I received a cherry pitter and for the first time since then cherries were on sale so I decided it was time to try again, in honor of the penultimate episode of Dollhouse. Only this time I added apples. I liked the apple cherry combination a lot more than just the plain cherry pie. I like cherries, but I think I like them better as a combination ingredient with other fruit. I had debated about adding blueberries into this mix as well and I think in the future I might try that, but sadly they were a bit pricey this week. The cherry pitter might be my new favorite kitchen toy. I have one made by OXO and using it gives this very satisfying punch to each cherry to push the pit out, sort of like using a leather punch. Someone needs to create one with an automatic cherry loader that would work like a machine gun. The best part of course is that the mess was all self contained.
I had the worst pie crust failure I've had in a long time on this one. I realized in the middle of pie making that I had no cold water in my kitchen and that threw off the timing and temperature of the water I used in making the dough. When it came time to roll it out I managed to get one decent crust out of the dough, but gave up and went for pastry shapes on top. It still worked out to a pretty pie though. The water is still not fixed a day later and the lesson here is always check that before you start cooking and more importantly never ever rent an apartment from Vantage Management if you can avoid it.
The filling is made up of 1 1/2 lbs of cherries, 3 large granny smith apples, 2 Tbs of tapioca, 1 cup of sugar, cinnamon and a few dots of butter.
January 29 will mark the last Dollhouse episode and assuming nothing else comes up, I'm planning the finale of Dollhouse and Pie as well. I started making pie partly for company who came over to watch the first early episodes and I've continued through most of both seasons, so now I'm faced with coming up with a suitable parting pie. It might have to feature red splatter in keeping with the latest few episodes.
I went home to Maine for a few days of Chanukah and there was occasion for pie. I made two apple blueberry pies. This was the first time I had worked with frozen blueberries before. They worked just fine, which means it is probably time to get over my need to only use fresh berries. The fillings is approximately six medium sized Cortland apples and 1 cup of frozen blueberries with 1 cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour and 2 tablespoons of tapioca. Unfortunately the filling did bubble over a little bit which made the overall pie less pretty, but I was happy with my dreidel cutouts.
The last three pies from Thanksgiving. Cranberry Apple
This was again a plain butter crust, and the insides are just granny smith apples, fresh cranberries, sugar, and tapioca to hold it together. I used a little extra sugar than I normally would in a fruit pie. I believe it was about a cup and a half. I did not use any regular pie spices. This was all about that cran-apple flavor. I got to use my new food processor for the first time on this one. When I bought the bag of cranberries I had sudden flashbacks to the horror that was depitting cherries and the mess it made of my kitchen. I knew that I couldn't leave the cranberries whole in the pie. Luckily, my new Kitchen Aid chopped the entire bag in less than 20 seconds. True I had to then clean it, and that is never fun, but I think the trade off to not have to slice or crush a bag of cranberries and end up with juice everywhere was well worth it. Sweet Potato and Pumpkin Pie. I didn't make this one. In general I don't much like either sweet potato pie or pumpkin pie. As those go this was however quite good. It was made by the lovely Marci.
Chocolate Raspberry Pie
This one was a joint effort with Marci. I made the crust which was a baking experiment. I'd place it as a moderate success. It's a chocolate butter crust. I took the normal ratio I use for a single pie crust (1 cup of flour - 1/3 cup of butter) and replaced 1/4 cup of the flour with cocoa powder. The crust was baked for about 20 minutes using beans as weights to keep it from bubbling up. The filling comes from here.
FILLING:
10 oz. pkg. frozen raspberries 1/2 c. softened butter 2 eggs 2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled 1 c. whipping cream 1/3 c. sugar 1/2 c. raspberry jam
Thaw raspberries and reserve juice. Cream together butter and sugar. Stir in chocolate. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat mixture for 3 minutes after each addition. Fold in whipped cream, berries and jam. Spoon mixture into the crust, making slightly raised crust. Chill for 2 hours. Decorate the top with fresh berries or whipped cream.
It actually took a while for me to find a recipe that looked good for a chocolate raspberry pie. I think if I did it again I might experiment a bit more and rely a little less on the jam which stuck out a little bit especially the next day. Also, be sure to let it chill. We missed that step on Thanksgiving so it was a bit too pudding like. It was perfect the day after Thanksgiving.
We served all of these with a rum infused whip cream that was really excellent, especially with the cranberry apple pie.
I invited folks over this weekend to do an apple pie tasting. I had seen a recipe on Serious Eats for Apple Peanut Butter Pie and wanted to try it. It may actually be the richest pie I've ever made. I think if I did it again I would not add extra sugar to the peanut butter, it was a bit too sweet for me. I bought three different kinds of apples. I paired the peanut butter pie with Red Delicious.
In addition I thought I would do a regular apple pie with a crumb topping. The apples for this were Fuji apples. This is actually the first crumb topping I've ever made: The third pie turned out to be my favorite. An apple cheddar pie. I used the regular butter to flour ratio (2 cups flour/10 tablespoons butter) and mixed in 1/2 cup of shredded cheddar and used milk instead of water to form the dough. The filling is granny smith apples, a tiny bit of cinnamon, sugar and another 1/2 cup or so of the cheddar just layered on top. It melted between the crust and the apples, and I love how it made the final look. I also got to play with the fondant cutters I picked up at Michael's last week. This is currently winning the prize for prettiest pie I've ever made:
And since no party would be complete without drink I made an apple cider rum punch. The rum was barely noticeable and I'm not sure it actually added anything to the taste. I got to serve it in one of my tea sets and that always makes me happy. Punch recipe is here, though mine had a bit more cinnamon and cloves. I warmed it up in the crock pot.
The last time I was in Maine my little brothers had been begging me to bake a pie. This time I indulged them and made an apple pie in keeping with it being Rosh Hashanah. I thought about using honey instead of sugar but the boys wanted a traditional pie. I used the bit of leftover pastry dough that I had to make a little pastry apple in the center of the pie. All in all it was a good trip home for the holiday and a very tasty pie.
Other apple things eaten included an apple cake and some fabulous apple crisp ice cream from Beal's.
My book club met this past weekend to discuss Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and in honor of it and since I was hosting I decided to bake of course. I made the fruit tarts in the previous post, but decided that I needed something thematically appropriate for our gathering. Incidentally Jane Austen is greatly improved by the addition of zombies and ninjas. The zombies are known as "unmentionables". I decided to take all the remaining fruit in my fridge and mix it up into "Unmentionable Pie". I figured it would be vaguely reminiscent of the mix of zombie body parts.
The filling is made up of apples (which I did buy for this purpose), peaches, grapes, strawberries, raspberries and kiwi.
In addition I also made a vegetable pie using cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, string beans, potato, a bit of cream, cheddar cheese and some broth. A variant of unmentionable pie as it also cleaned out parts of my fridge.
I went for dinner last night at Stand down on 12th and University Place. There was a tasty burger and fries but most importantly there was an apple pie milkshake. I've seen a lot of milkshake flavors before but not this one. So obviously given my current pie fetish I had to try it. And it was mighty tasty. In fact if I could drink that every day I'd be one happy camper...also the size of a whale but that is a different issue. However while the apple pie milk shake was an amazing combination of whipped cream, ice cream, apple pie and cinnamon it leads me to want to make all kinds of pie shakes. Of course this means that I need to get a blender in addition to the food processor I want. But for triberry pie milkshakes I think that will be worth it.
The Duchy of Domesticity is the home of all the domestic projects that I feel like sharing with the world. Primarily at the moment this is pie. Because who doesn't like pie?
The third pie turned out to be my favorite. An apple cheddar pie. I used the regular butter to flour ratio (2 cups flour/10 tablespoons butter) and mixed in 1/2 cup of shredded cheddar and used milk instead of water to form the dough. The filling is granny smith apples, a tiny bit of cinnamon, sugar and another 1/2 cup or so of the cheddar just layered on top. It melted between the crust and the apples, and I love how it made the final look. I also got to play with the fondant cutters I picked up at Michael's last week. This is currently winning the prize for prettiest pie I've ever made:
The last time I was in Maine my little brothers had been begging me to bake a pie. This time I indulged them and made an apple pie in keeping with it being Rosh Hashanah. I thought about using honey instead of sugar but the boys wanted a traditional pie. I used the bit of leftover pastry dough that I had to make a little pastry apple in the center of the pie.
