Improptu Pie

The pie for Friday, July 1st was a surprise, even to me. I hadn't made anything until Monday, and Ben, a friend of mine, brought some of his friends over to hang out for a bit. Then they told me that they were having a baking adventure. Cake, cupcakes, and cookies would all be in attendance, so I figured, 'why not add a pie?' They were well stocked with all sorts of berries, so we made ourselves a Many Berry Pie.

It started out with a double helping of your good ol' pie crust. This time, though, no blind baking. The whole thing bakes together. Just roll out both halves of the crust and put one into the pie plate. Freeze them both together until it comes time to assemble the pie.

For the fruity insides, you'll want about 4 cups of assorted berries. We used about two cups of strawberries and two-thirds of a cup of each blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries. 'But Hats,' you might say, 'those are not botanically berries! Aside from blueberries, you're talking about aggregate fruits! You should call this the Berry and friends pie.'

Oh well. We can call it the Many Berry(-of-which-most-are-botanically-not-berries) Pie. But that's a mouthful, and I'd much rather have a mouthful of pie.

4 cups of berries (or things like it)
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup minute tapioca
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons butter, cubed and chilled

Liven up the tapioca mix with a splash of water and let stand for five minutes to soak it all up. I do this because the bits occasionally end up on top of the fruit and stay relatively dry throughout the rest of the process. When this happens, you end up with little crunchy tapioca bits. It almost feels like pie bones. Not fun. Then toss the sugar and fruit with the tapioca and spices (that's everything other than the butter). Let stand for fifteen to twenty minutes, to let some juices soak out. A few minutes before you've finished letting the fruit soak, pull the pie crusts out to let them approach room temp (otherwise the top crust will be too frozen and will not cooperate when you try to assemble the pie). Transfer the fruit mixture into the crust, then dot with the cubed butter. Place the other crust on top and seal together by pinching along the edge. I made a fancy lattice top by slicing the crust into inch-wide strips and laying them over the top, weaving them together to make it all beautiful.

The pie looked good, but I did not get to try it. By the time we had finished all of the baking for our baking extravaganza, it was like 2 in the morning, so we opted for sleeps.