I just had my first mad scientist moment.

I made a plum pie last night and it was flippin' awesome. It's gone now. Just me and Chris in one day.


I know I've been slacking about the blog. I'm sorry. It just isn't holding my interest. I'm even a week or so on pies. It's too hard to come up with new things I haven't made before.
But I'm here to talk about that Plum Pie. Nice and tart, not too sweet, crisp and moist in all the right places. SO DELICIOUS

But it was pretty runny; the filling didn't really hold itself together. As a result, it was hard to cut and serve, and as time passed, the streusel top lost a lot of its crisp. We talked about how to try to fix that each time we ate a slice and in the moments after while we reveled in the yum. One thought was that the plums were overripe and therefore too wet with juice. Or, that the recipe's ambiguity (it calls for four cups or one and a half pounds of plums. we measured both ways and it was about two pounds at four cups, so we just went with that) lead us to make a mistake. So as we devoured it, we devised a series of tests for this recipe. As we ate the final slices and I considered how many plums to buy, I threw my head back and laughed. Loudly.

I think I may have put a streak of white through my hair.

Needless to say, I'm excited about my new project.

The oldest pie yet

It's a recipe known as Gradma Wilke's Cheesecake. But Grandma Wilke was my great-grandmother, so it's a recipe that's been around for a while. My mom always used to make this when I was a kid and I helped out a few times, so you might say it was my very first pie. When I was in middle school, we invented a key-lime variant that I'll tell you all about later. Anyway, it's a pretty basic recipe, but it's super delicious.

B-T-dubs: remember all that talk about graham cracker crusts in the last post? For this recipe, don't bake it. I used the two-thirds/no-extra-crumbs-on-the-sides version. But then, the filling goes in the unbaked crust.

3 (8oz) packages cream cheese
1 cup sugar
5 eggs
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract

I got to use my brand-new (refurbished) Kitchenaid Stand Mixer! Turns out they're made real close to my hometown in Ohio, so I went and got one for cheep when I went home to visit recently. I'm super excited. Anyway, get the cream cheese and the sugar going, then add the eggs one at a time. Add the vanilla, and scrape down the sides and paddle, then mix it up a bit again. Pour it in the springform on top of the crust, and bake at 300F for an hour. Meanwhile, get on the topping:

1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Just mix em all together. Easy. Once the hour is up, spread the topping over the cheesecake and bake for five more minutes. Let it cool for an hour or so, then stash it in the fridge.

I brought a bunch in to work with me last weekend, and it was pretty darn popular. Since we have strawberries on the salad bar, lots of folks topped a slice of cheesecake with strawberries for great success.

A Very Ugli Kickoff Pie

This year's Piebrary is fully underway! I made three pies for the Kicoff party on Saturday, and two of them were new. Well, one is a variant on a recipe I've done before and one is a very old recipe I've never made by myself, until Saturday.

The one I'm talking about for this post is Ugli Pie, and it lived up to its name. It's a variation on Lemon Icebox Pie; I saw some Ugli fruit at the store a day or two before and immediately started brainstorming pie ideas. Since Ugli is a citrus fruit, I decided to use one of our other citrus pies and switch the fruit juice. Since the Ugli is pretty tart, I thought a simple pie that helps make the tartness stand out would work well, so Lemon Icebox Pie was the winner.

It's just a graham cracker crust; for this one I used similar proportions to any other graham cracker crust. However, I've noticed that I'm not terribly accurate with the previous graham cracker crust recipes, so I'm gonna break it down again.

When I'm feeling enterprising with cheesecake, I usually go with this:

30 square graham crackers (they typically come in big rectangles; break those in half and you get squares)

1 tablespoon sugar

1 stick of butter, melted

I preheat the oven to 300F and toss the butter to melt. Crackers and sugar go in a bag, and I punch 'em a bit to break up the crackers. If I'm impatient, the butter only gets about three-quarters melted, and I break down the rest with a fork and some vigorous sloshing. Then I mix the crackers into the butter, adding them slowly at first to avoid big buttery clumps. about a third of the mixture goes out onto a pan and the rest in the bottom of my springform (which I've lined with parchment paper). Then, both pans go into the oven for ten minutes. After the cheesecake is totally finished, you can squish the extra crumbs into the sides for a delicious and attractive result.

For this pie (and when I'm lazy), I reduced by about a third and skipped the extra pan of crumbs for the side of the pie. Like so:

20 squares

1 tablespoon sugar (so what if it's a little sweeter?)

6 tablespoons butter, melted

The method is basically identical, so I won't bother

Here's the Ugli filling:

1 (8oz) package cream cheese

1 (14oz) can condensed milk

1/2 cup Ugli juice

1 tablespoon zest (the Ugli rind was not very nice, so I would recommend lemon, if you have it)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix it all together, and when the crust is done, pour it in and chill that bad boy! This time, the filling was just mixed by hand (I think I usually use an electric mixer), so it had little clumps of cream cheese. It took a little longer to set, but other than that, turned out well! and ugly. I also poured the filling in too fast, so some of the crust broke off and floated to the top. This and the clumps of cream cheese helped the Ugli Pie live up to its name.

But Ugli Pie was delicious!

Piebrary 2012!

Whoo! It's almost time for this year's pie adventure. Are you guys ready!?

The past year has been pretty busy; so here's a quick breakdown of my pie-sploitations for the past year:

Lots of pies during the holiday season, particularly the pumpkin-themed ones, although I've switched to butternut squash pretty much exclusively. Primarily because it's available for a lot longer - I saw pumpkins in the store for about two weeks, but the squash was available for at least another month. In addition to that, butternut squash is a lot more flavorful! You'll have to check it out. Anyway, for Thanksgiving, I set a record: five pies in one day. I wouldn't have been able to do it without Chris R's help.

Then, for my 23rd birthday, 23 pies! It took a little over a week to get 'em all done, but it was a whirlwind adventure that I can't wait to try again! I also bumped up the pies-in-one-day record. I think I managed eight, but I don't remember exactly. So I guess I'll have to try and repeat it, to make sure!

And more recently, rhubarb is back! Lots of rhubarb pies and rhubarb cheescakes at the beginning of may have been getting me excited about trying some new crazy things this summer!!

So this Saturday, we're kicking off this year's Piebrary! There's a big brunch party at my place. I'm baking at least a few pies. Some are prolly repeats, but no less than one of them is going to be new and I'll tell you all about it after. I'm also going to make some various breakfast/brunch type things, and hopefully some of the other folks coming to help celebrate will bring some delicious things. If you want to come, let me know in the comments, and I'll invite you to the facebook event. (I don't know if there's anyone who reads this that I don't already know on facebook, so we'll deal with that hurdle if it comes up.)

Yeah pie!

Peachy

All right. So I guess it's inevitable that I'll always be behind schedule on either baking or blogging.

Anyway, this pie was for Monday, August 8th. It's a Peach Cream Tart.

The crust is a sweet pastry, flavored with sour cream. I think it was a nice touch, but the sour cream made it a bit stickier than a normal crust, so it clumped up and made it tougher to press into the tart pan. The sides of the crust ended up a bit thicker than the bottom.

1 1/4 cups flour
1 stick butter
2 tablespoons sour cream

I made this one just like the normal pie crusts, substituting the sour cream for the water step. So cube up the butter and freeze it for about fifteen minutes. Pulse it into the flour in three additions, then add the sour cream and pulse a few times until incorporated. Then press the clumps into the tart pan, starting on the sides. Chill for half an hour, and preheat the oven to 375F. Then bake for fifteen minutes and reduce the oven to 350F.

6 peaches, peeled and sliced thin
1 tablespoon lemon juice
3 egg yolks
3/4 cup sour cream
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour

While you're slicing the peaches, toss them in the lemon juice to prevent them from browning. Then arrange the slices in overlapping circles in the crust. They might stack up higher than the crust in places, but they'll cook down a little so don't fret.
Mix the other stuff in a separate bowl until smooth, then pour over the peaches. Pour extremely slowly. It's pretty viscous and the cracks between the peaches are pretty small. If you have to, pour some in and just let it settle down for a few minutes before adding more. Once you get it all in there, pop the pie into the oven for an hour or so. It may be difficult to tell if the custard is set, with all those peaches in there. Mine hadn't set entirely when I took it out, but I didn't know it until I sliced the pie. Still delicious, though!

quiiiiiiiiicccccccchhhhhhhhhheee

I baked this quiche a week late, but it has been rolling around in my head for a while.
Because I love me a Reuben sandwich.

Good ol' pie crust, blind baked just like the rest of the quiches. Then I laid down a nice bed of sauerkraut, then corned beef, and some Swiss cheese to top it off. The usual egg base was modified to include a bit of my homemade Russian dressing. I reduced the half and half to about 3/4 cup, and finished it off with the Russian dressing. I used about two thirds of a 25oz jar of sauerkraut, and 8oz of the corned beef. There was prolly about half a cup or so of cheese on top, and I might consider adding some inside as well.
Reuben Quiche 2.0 hopefully will include a rye crust. I might try using either rye chips or some rye bread crumbs in place of some of the flour. Oughta be delish.

WINNER

So I've been doing all these crazy things with fruit curds, right? And I made one that reminded me vaguely of blueberry, right? Well I decided to see how blueberry would work out in this recipe.

I tried puréeing blueberries to strain the mush for some juice. No dice. It turned out way too thick.
So I just used the purée. Pow.
Half a cup plus about a tablespoon to replace the lemon juice and zest in the Lemon Meringue Pie makes a Blueberry Meringue Pie.

If there should be a winner of the Fruit Curd and Meringue Experiments, this is the one. Shit it's tasty.