Confessions of a Mormon Foodie: Pie Recipes

Showing posts with label Pie Recipes. Show all posts

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Making a Pinky Pie

Making food should be fun. Sometimes it’s not much fun, I’ll admit. Creating food that is fun to see, and eat, can be rewarding, though, even if making it presents a few problems.

One of our family’s traditions is that I make my kids a special birthday cake, decorated according to their interests and personality. For better or worse, my 20 year old son is a Brony. For those who don’t know, a Brony is an adult fan of the My Little Pony show. Yes, Virginia, my son watches a show designed for little girls. He’s not alone. There are plenty of adults from all walks of life that love that show. With that in mind, I had to figure out how to make the Boy a My Little Pony themed birthday cake.

The Boy is not a huge cake fan. Neither is his younger sister. His favorite My Little Pony character is named Pinky Pie. In a state of punnific inspiration, I threw out the cake idea and make him a birthday pie, instead.

I didn’t have a lot of time with this one so, I did the only thing a sensible person would do. I turned to the baking shelves in the grocery store and bought a cheese cake mix, adding a bit of red food coloring to make it pink.

Next came the pattern. I’d found a Pinky Pie t-shirt for sale on the web, and downloaded a picture of it, copying the stylized portrait of that particular little pony onto a sheet of paper to make a pattern for the top of the cake.

Fortune smiled on me in the form of left-over fondant in the freezer. I mixed more red food coloring with some of it to fashion the mane, and left the rest white for the eyes. For the iris, I mixed up some blue food coloring with granulated sugar and sprinkled it on top. The rest was a combination of red and black decorating gel.

A word of warning about decorating gel. Don’t apply it until just before serving. It will separate and seep a colored sugar-water over the rest of your project if you let it sit very long. Blech.

I’m not going to kid you. It was fun, but it was a pain. I had trouble with the pattern. It stuck to the top of the cheesecake when I was trying to transfer the outline. The fondant kept getting way to warm to handle way too quickly and didn’t want to behave, especially for the mane. The blue sugar didn’t want to lay down where I wanted it to. (In retrospect, I should have made the irises from blue fondant). I had to make it a day prior to my son coming for a visit, due to scheduling problems, and so I was mopping up red and black seepage from the gel before showing it to him. ARRRRGGGG!

The work was worth it, though, at least in retrospect. It really was fun to present, and eat. My wife and daughters were impressed. My son was ecstatic. How could he not be? I’d make him a Pinky Pie for his birthday.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Peanut Butter Pie, Take One

A couple of days ago I started wondering if anyone had ever made a peanut butter custard pie. I like to think I'm creative, but let's face it. Most things have already been thought of. So, I went to Google.

It turns out there's a gold mine of peanut butter pie recipes. Trouble is, most of them are the very same recipe. With only one exception, none of them came close to the custard pie I was dreaming of. Even that one didn't look like it was quite what I had in mind.

I also realized that I wouldn't have time to experiment for a while. So, until the fateful day that I can mess up my kitchen enough to come up with my own peanut butter pie, let me offer you a recipe that I found. It turns out that it tastes better than I thought it would. It's also very easy to make. Yes, I'm adding to the glut of this very recipe appearing on a dozen sites already, but hey. I've always liked baker's dozens.

Ingredients

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
4 oz. cream cheese (or neufchatel)
1 cup powdered sugar
8 oz. carton of whipped topping
1 (9 inch) graham cracker pie shell
chocolate syrup (optional)

Cream together the peanut butter, cream cheese, and powdered sugar with a hand mixer until smooth. Add whipped topping and continue mixing until completely incorporated and creamy. Spread into the pie shell, cover, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Drizzle with chocolate syrup and serve.

Makes 6 – 8 slices.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Thanksgiving Sweet Potato Pie

For some reason, Pumpkin Pie has taken over in the minds and hearts of most Americans as the pie for Thanksgiving. A close cousin, which our friends in the South have been eating for years, is Sweet Potato Pie. They're only slightly different in texture and flavor but, to be honest, I like them better.

Sweet potatoes have been misnamed in America. Sometimes we call them yams. The true African yam has little to do with the sweet potato. In fact, if you don't cook a true yam properly, you could get very sick and possibly die. Yep! Without proper preparation, a true African yam will kill you.

Sweet potatoes, especially in pie, won't kill you, although the rest of the ingredients might. Oh, well. What a way to go, eh?

Ingredients

2 lbs sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed.
1 stick of butter, softened
2 eggs, separated
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1/4 cup white sugar
1 (9 inch) unbaked pie crust
Non-stick cooking spray

For lazy chefs, like me, you can substitute with canned sweet potatoes. Just make sure you mash them up.

Preheat your oven to 400 degree Fahrenheit.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the sweet potatoes, butter, egg yolks, evaporated milk, brown sugar, salt, and spices. Use a hand mixer and blend until smooth and fully combined.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Combine with the white sugar, and then carefully fold the egg whites into the sweet potato mixture.

Spray the inside of the pie shell with non-stick cooking spray. Believe it or not, this will help keep the pie crust from getting soggy. Pour in the sweet potato mixture. Cover the crust with foil or a commercial pie crust cover.

Bake at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes. Remove the foil, reduce the heat to 350 degrees F, and cook for an additional 20 to 30 minutes, or until the pie is set. (Give the pie a little shake. If the very center jiggles slightly, it's time to take the pie out.)

Serve with whipped cream and a glass of cold milk.

If you don't have the time, or inclination, you can skip separating the eggs, and just combine the whole mess in a mixing bowl, all at once. It still tastes great, it's just not as fluffy.

I like to make several pies and share them with my family and friends. I also use it as an excuse to visit my Home Teaching families in November. Why should the Relief Society get all the food credit?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo by Gilbert Tremblay. Used by permission.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Simple Pie Crust - Mother's Day Pie

Yesterday was Mother's Day. With all the to-do here about pie, I decided to make my wife a pie. It would be a personal homemade gift for her, and a new blog entry for me.

Win - win.

In any case I decided to make a cherry lattice pie. This had less to do with the fact that my wife likes cherry pie than with the lone can of cherry pie filling in the pantry.

Besides, I was going to go all out and make the pie crust myself. That makes it all better, right?

Don't answer that.

You may remember that I don't like making my own pie crusts. I always have trouble with them. A friend of mine, Micheline Savard, sent me a dirt simple pie crust recipe. It's similar (in one case nearly identical) to other pie crust recipe's I've tried, but so what? I'd try it anyway. Here it is:

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 cup butter

Mix the flour and salt together in a medium size bowl. Using a pastry blender, cut in the butter until you have coarse crumbs. Add ICE water just until it holds together. Press into a pie plate and make as thick or thin as you want.

I didn't have that much butter in the house, so I used shortening instead. I didn't just press it in, either. I divided the dough ball in half and rolled it out. It was nearly the same as a double crust recipe I know so I figured it would be fine.

Getting the pie crust off the cutting board and into the pie plate is always the trick. I've learned a few different methods of doing this. One is to roll the dough onto the rolling pin and then unroll it into the pie plate. The other involves folding it into quarters and then unfolding it into the pie plate.

It always looks so easy when I see other people do it.

For whatever reason, it never works out that way for me. I always err on the side of trying to make the crust really flaky. I love a good flaky pie crust. Of course that means that you can't add too much water to the mix, which also means the crust is harder to work with. Sure enough, this pie crust kept falling apart in the transfer. After two or three tries I gave up. I dropped the pieces int0 the pie plate as best I could and reassembled it there, sealing the cracks by smooshing the edges together. It looked more like a car accident than a pie crust.

After pouring in the canned filling, I started to work on the lattice top. Cutting the rolled out crust into thin strips was the easy part. Getting those strips onto the pie without breaking apart was an act of faith.

Apparently I don't have enough faith when it comes to pie crusts, because every one of them broke apart. Thank goodness a lack of faith in pie crusts isn't going to affect my standing in the church. I used several words at the time that I will need to repent of, though

Trying to weave them together was a nightmare. After a quick try, I decided to cut to the chase and laid several rows left to right, and then several more top to bottom. The checkered effect was there, but to say it was a true "lattice" is like saying a glob of melted steel is a true Rolls Royce.

Pretty, this pie was not. It didn't look that bad, but it was nowhere near as pretty as the picture you see at the top of the blog. I'm not daring enough to post pictures of my own creations.

It was flaky, though. Well, it was half flaky - half crumbly. Ugly it may have been, but mmmmm. It tasted good.

I have a confession to make. (Go figure. Have you seen the title of this blog? Duh!) Even though I made it for my wife, I ended up eating more slices than she did. More than my kids, for that matter.

Sorry, honey.

Mmmmmm . . . honey . . . .