This week was all about the pie. How should we start? With the good or the bad?
The preheat/the good. Two hours to bake holiday cookie topped mini pies. The options were: cherry, blackberry, cookie butter, butterscotch, pecan, chess, peppermint, peanut butter, and coconut custard. By random drawing, I got butterscotch. Yum!
I got to work on the dough so it could be refrigerated while I worked on the butterscotch filling. Timing should be decent since mini pies would bake and cool a lot faster and I have a 4-count mini pie pan (first time using it).
It took about 45 minutes to make the dough, the filling, the meringue, and blind bake the pie crust, before popping everything in the oven for 15 minutes to brown. As soon as it was done, I cleared some room in the freezer to rapidly chill it.
While it was baking, I made a speculoos cookie dough that I figured would go well with the pie. I used small fondant cutters to cut the dough out for a winter scene.
Time was getting tight and I only had about 8 minutes to paint my easy cookie glaze on the cookies. With a minute to go, I removed the pies from the baking pan and topped the meringue with the cookies. The cookies didn’t want to stay standing up so I did have to fix them after time ran out for a photo. They looked really cute and tasted good, though I think I might have put too much salt in the butterscotch filling. Overall, I would say it was a success.
Now the main heat, on the other hand, posed some challenges. The pie type selection was lattice, slab, double crust, cream, and custard. The fillings were cranberry and almond, butternut squash and maple, chestnut and chocolate, pumpkin and cider, bourbon and pear, apple and fennel, apple and raisin, sweet potato and pecan. and sweet potato with chai. I randomly drew cream pie with apple and raisin.
Apple cream pie? Sounded odd. My idea was to have the texture of bread pudding and top with whipped cream. Well, it all fell apart then.
Two hours were allotted in this bake. And the twist was to add eggnog somewhere in the pie. I made the dough in my food processor and substituted some of the water for calvados (which is so good in baking). I peeled, cored, and chopped up 5 apples for the filling, adding some sugar, more calvados, cinnamon, and raisins. Then I put milk, eggnog, heavy cream, cornstarch, and sugar in a pot, heated that up, and added egg yolks. I obviously got a pastry cream out of it, but I thought if I poured it over the apples in the pie crust and baked it, it would incorporate into the apple layer. It never did. It baked the pastry cream on top which actually tastes pretty good, but I’m not sure it counts as a cream pie.
I threw the pie in the freezer as long as I could and made little snowman features out of white modeling chocolate. Also made a vanilla whipped cream.
When it was down to 6 minutes left, I piped the whipped cream on the pie like a snowman, added the features, and snapped a picture. Back in the freezer it went. Checked on it a few minutes after time was up and the whipped cream was sliding off the pie and onto the contents below it in the freezer. That’s what happens to snowmen in Phoenix, AZ. That’s what happens when you bake a pie and try to put whipped cream on it all in 2 hours time.
I’m pretty sure I would have been eliminated this week. The main heat was a mess and the apples should have been precooked. They were still way too crunchy. Lesson learned. See you next week.
All Things Crafty 