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!