Despite the fact that it will be February in one hour, rest assured that my project has been completed. I’ve just been a little too lazy in posting my final two weeks.

On Christmas Eve, I baked a Grasshopper Pie to take to my sister-in-law’s Christmas Eve party. I referred to this as Booze Pie while I was baking it, because it contained a lot of booze. I had to visit two liquor stores in lovely Park Slope to procure the green Creme de Menthe and clear Creme de Cacao (which both made an appearance at our New Year’s Eve party when my husband and his friend made Ginger Mint Surprises and Cacao Zeroes (don’t ask).)

This recipe started with a Mint Oreo cookie crust that was made up of crushed Mint Oreos and butter. Delicious.

The filling was comprised of the aforementioned booze and not much else. Some gelatin and whipped cream were involved to both stabilize and lighten the filling:

The filling went into the pie crust, which was then refrigerated overnight:

The filling tasted incredibly alcoholic the night it was made, but mellowed out the next day. It came out deliciously minty with a nice chocolately finish from the crust. The party guests seemed to enjoy it.

The next post will be my last! I can hardly believe it.

Thanksgiving! The second best holiday of the year (Christmas is number one, of course, and Halloween is probably third). My Thanksgiving this year was different from all my past ones; instead of watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, I got to see it in person!

Also, my mom came out to visit from Ohio! This was also a pretty big deal, as my mom has never been to New York City before. We took her around to all the tourist traps and posed for pictures with the Naked Cowboy. Much fun was had.

My darling husband insisted that I make some kind of crazy cranberry sauce this year, so I scoured the Internet for recipes. I found one that combined cranberries with pears, sugar and honey and seemed easy enough to figure out. It actually turned out quite lovely. I’m not a cranberry sauce fan, but even I put a little on my turkey this year:

My main project though was a Pumpkin Pie. My husband’s family is all about traditions at holiday events, so when I told Rob I wanted to mix things up a little bit and make a Pumpkin Chiffon Pie, he was beyond nervous. He was so afraid that the pie would be some radical experiment. But it wasn’t! I followed the recipe from How To Eat a Cupcake, and it turned out great! The only problem I had was that my pre-baked pie crust slid down the pie pan on one side a little…not enough to ruin the pie, but enough to ruin the aesthetic.
What makes this pie a little different is that it incorporates gelatin and whipped egg whites in with the traditional pumpkin filling. It makes for an incredibly light pie. I like pumpkin pie well enough, but after one piece I’m usually done until the next Thanksgiving. I could have eaten two or three slices of this one.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the pie-making process, as I was really busy putting it and the cranberry sauce together the night before Thanksgiving (we had to be up at 5 a.m. Thanksgiving morning to get to the parade route in time). But here’s the finished product, which went over very well:

Sorry it took so long to get this posted. You wouldn’t believe what moving to a whole new state and starting a brand new job can do to a person! But here it is, finally!

This past Saturday, Rob and I attended our first New Jersey party. It was our friend Jennifer’s birthday, so she celebrated by throwing a Mexican-themed party at her house. Earlier in the week I had planned to bake for her party, and I found a recipe for Apple Hand Pies; little hand-held apple pies with a powdered sugar glaze. Perfect! Once I found out about the Mexican theme, I realized that these little hand pies looked suspiciously like empanadas…what a perfect match!

Baking in a brand new kitchen, with only limited utensils and pots and pans is quite the experience. I brought a lot of stuff with me, but there were times I found myself reaching for something, only to say, “Oh yeah, that’s in storage…”

The recipe started with making a standard two-crust pie dough, which had two tablespoons of sugar added for sweetness. The dough was divided in two and chilled in the fridge. While the dough was chilling, I got busy cooking up the apples for the filling:

When the apples had cooled down, I removed one of the two halves of the dough from the refrigerator and rolled it out fairly thin. Next, I cut out circles from the dough and placed them on a greased cookie sheet. A tablespoon of the apple filling was placed on one half of each circle:

Once each circle was topped with filling, the pies were folded in half. The edges were crimped with a fork and the tops were brushed with egg wash. Finally, two one-inch slits were cut in the top of each pie to allow steam to escape:

The pies were baked for about 20-25 minutes until they were a golden brown color. Once they had cooled down, I mixed up a powdered sugar/water/vanilla/corn syrup glaze to drizzle over them:

They were a big hit at the party, and I really want to make them again sometime. My only issue was that two Granny Smith apples were not quite enough. Next time I’d definitely use three apples at least!

I have no idea yet what I’m baking this week. I should probably make that decision today, because I plan to make a grocery store run tomorrow!

I absolutely cannot believe I’ve made it to the halfway point of this project. Twenty-six weeks have passed and I haven’t given up yet. This is some kind of a record for me.

This week, I decided I would bake some cookies for my dad for Father’s Day (seeing as how I’m not exactly rolling in cash right now). And I thought, “Hey, if I’m driving down to Zanesville to give my dad some cookies, maybe I should make my grandmother’s favorite pie too!” (My grandmother lives right next door to my parents.)

My grandmother absolutely loves Strawberry Pie. My aunt used to waitress at a Frisch’s Big Boy and would occasionally bring home Strawberry Pie for my grandma, who would flip out over it. As luck would have it, the current issue of Cook’s Illustrated features a ‘Diner-Style Strawberry Pie’ recipe and I couldn’t wait to try it.

The recipe started with a single pie crust. This was your pretty standard flour/sugar/salt/shortening/butter/ice water pie crust, which came together pretty easily. No vodka this time! Once the dough was gathered into a ball, it was wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated for an hour:

Once it had chilled, it was rolled out to fit into a 9-inch pie pan:

I had some trouble getting the dough into the pan. On my first try, I ripped the dough and had to roll it out again. I was more careful the second time and managed to get the dough situated, but I’m sure re-rolling it made it tougher than it should have been:

I got to buy a few new toys at Sur La Table for these projects, including some ceramic pie weights. I know I could have just used beans or rice, but these were under $7 and I love the jar:

The weighted pie dough went into the oven. It came out a little too brown for my taste, but, having never baked a single pie crust before, this may be perfect. I never see the top of the bottom parts of my pie crusts, because they’re covered with filling!

While the pie crust baked, I went to work cooking down some frozen strawberries. Cook’s Illustrated stated that it would take about 25 to 30 minutes for the strawberries to cook down to two cups of a jam-like goo. It took more like an hour. I’m not sure what I did wrong with that…maybe I didn’t have the heat up high enough, or maybe using the Dole frozen strawberries that the magazine strongly suggested I not use affected the time (the Cascadian Farms frozen strawberries the magazine wanted me to use were going to cost me around $12. No thank you!):

Once the strawberries cooked down, I added sugar, lemon juice, water and gelatin and the mixture was left to cool to room temperature. While it cooled, I hulled and sliced a pound of fresh strawberries, which were then folded into the cooled strawberry/gelatin mixture. This was poured into the cooled pie crust:

The whole thing went into the fridge overnight. The following morning, we loaded a cooler up with ice and packed up the pie. I was afraid that if I just held it on my lap for the drive, that it would turn into strawberry soup. The cooler worked really well! I highly recommend it as a means to transport icebox pies. Look at how pretty it turned out:

My parents, Rob and I trekked up to my grandmother’s house and cut into the pie. To my relief, it did not fall apart on me! I whipped up some cream cheese/heavy cream topping to dollop on the slices:

It seemed to go over very well. My grandmother kept the remaining three slices or so. I’m sure she ate all of them by herself!

While I was working on the pie, I was also trying to deal with the cookies I was baking for my dad. Two of the toys I picked up at Sur La Table were cookie cutters that fit my dad to a T:

Yup, that’s a hammer and saw. My dad’s a construction worker.

The cookie dough was a pretty simple combination of butter and sugar, a little salt, a couple of eggs, vanilla and flour. That’s it. No chemical leavener. It was rolled up into two discs and refrigerated. I was planning to cut cookies out of both discs, but it turned out that one would be quite enough. The dough was refrigerated overnight (it can keep up to a week in the fridge – I still have another disc in there that I need to bake!)

Cutting out the cookies went just fine, as did the baking. They came out golden brown and have just the slightest crunchiness to the edges. The centers have a great toothiness to them:

(I sneaked a corgi in there too! Some friends gave us a corgi cookie cutter, and I had just enough dough left to make one little corgi cookie!)

Once the cookies had cooled, I went to work making Royal Icing. I was super excited, as I have always wanted to make and work with Royal Icing. Since I was only making half my cookies, I decided to half the icing recipe as well. So I doled out half the confectioner’s sugar, half the meringue and half the vanilla. And then I dumped in the full amount of water. Yup. And didn’t even realize it! I was mixing and mixing and the icing was not fluffing up at all. I stared at the recipe for a good five minutes before I realized my mistake. So I added the other half of the sugar, meringue powder and vanilla, but my icing never did reach a good consistency. I divided what I ended up with and colored one batch gray and the other red. My plan was to make the handles of the ‘tools’ red and the rest gray. I spooned the gray icing into a piping bag and started in on a cookie.

It was a disaster. The icing immediately started running off the cookie, leaving a lovely blue/gray stain. I got so frustrated that I threw out all the icing and cracked open a can of (gasp) Pillsbury white icing:

My dad didn’t seem to care. The point of the cookies was the shape, not the icing, so I’m trying to not beat myself up too badly about screwing up the icing. I will try it again someday, but maybe not for a while. I need to wrap my head around it.

This weekend is ComFest!, the greatest three-day outdoor free local music/art festival ever! It’s a big gathering in Columbus’ Goodale Park that features local music on about six different stages from noon to ten Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Rob and I help run the Band Merch Booth where we sell the performing bands’ CDs and t-shirts. Set-up is always a fun but trying time, so I thought that some homemade muffins might make the day a little better. So I’m going to bake some blueberry muffins and maybe some cranberry ones as well. Might as well start the weekend off right, and get some food in people’s stomachs before they start drinking!

I can’t believe it’s taken we twenty-three weeks to bake a pie! But summer is finally here, and fruits are in season, so pie time it was.

Apple pie is probably one of my top five foods. I would love for my last meal to be stuffed peppers, apple pie with Jeni’s Honey Vanilla Bean ice cream and Framboise with ginger ale. That sounds absolutely perfect.

A couple of months ago I was watching “The America’s Test Kitchen” show on PBS and they made a blueberry pie with a pie crust that included vodka! It was amazing! The reasoning was that too much water can make a pie crust tough. Vodka, on the other hand, mostly evaporates in heat, and therefore does not make the crust tough. And the alcohol completely evaporates, so you don’t end up with a boozy pie.

The recipe started with flour, sugar, salt being processed together in a food processor:

Next, shortening and butter were chilled and cut into small pieces and evenly distributed around the flour mixture. This was pulsed together until lumps formed:

The dough was then transferred to a bowl and the water and vodka were sprinkled over and smooshed together until the dough all came together. I got very nervous at this point, because the dough was incredibly wet. I was sure that I’d messed something up. The dough was divided into two pieces and each was wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated for an hour:

In the meantime, I peeled, cored and chopped ten apples! Five Granny Smith and five Cameos went into the pie. Once the apples were sliced, they went into a large pot with sugar, brown sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice. As it turned out, I should not have put the lemon juice in at this point. But I don’t think it affected the pie in the least:

The apples were set over medium heat for twenty minutes so that they could cook down. Normally you do not cook down the apples before putting them into a pie. The authors of this cookbook feel that if you don’t cook the apples, when the pie is baked the apples shrink, leaving a gap between the apples and the crust. If you cook the apples down, you can fit the crust on top of the already shrunken apples and you will not have the gap.

After twenty minutes, the apples were dumped out onto a rimmed baking sheet to cool to room temperature. If I had just dumped them into the pie, the heat of the apples would have melted the butter in the pie crust. Not a good idea.

While the apples were cooling, the bottom crust pie dough was rolled out and fitted to the pie pan. The top crust pie dough was rolled out and put on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Both were then put back in the fridge to chill again.

The cooled apples were drained of the liquid that had collected and one fourth cup was reserved. This was when I should have added the lemon juice. The apples were loaded into the prepared pie pan and the reserved liquid was sprinkled on top of the apples. Then the top crust pie dough was rolled on top of the apples. The crust was trimmed and crimped, air vents were cut and I was ready to go.

But wait. Something was missing. I looked at all the scraps of dough I had left over from trimming the edges and remembered a cookie cutter that I had…

Excellent. I’m so proud of both the apple cut out and the crimped edges. I’ve always just folded my pie crust edges over into a messy seal, but I knew I had to do something fancier for my first blog pie.

The pie was baked for about 55 minutes and came out looking a little something like this:

I cut into the pie once it had cooled down and loaded it up onto a plate:

One look inside the cut apple pie revealed just how many apples went into that bad boy:

Over the weekend I had purchased some ingredients to make ice cream, but got sidelined by that nasty allergic reaction I mentioned in my last post. So yesterday morning when I woke up, I decided I would make some vanilla ice cream to go with this pie. How can you not have apple pie a la mode?

Everything was going fine with the ice cream making until I went to get the milk. I needed one cup, so I grabbed our milk carton from the fridge and realized that I had maybe one fourth cup splishing around in the bottom of that carton. Yikes.

Then I remembered I had some leftover buttermilk in the back of the fridge, thought, “What the hey?” and added in enough to make one cup. It came out delicious! The buttermilk made the ice cream a little richer and cut down on some of the sweetness from the sugar. Yum:

Next week I’m making some Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams inspired cupcakes for a friend’s birthday party. Salty Caramel Cupcakes and Root Beer Float Cupcakes with Honey Vanilla Buttercream Frosting, here I come!