A Couple of Things About Pie

And a Valentine Bake Sale

I have baked more in the past two years than probably the 10 years prior. Baking is always cyclical for me. If I’m surrounded by people who enjoy eating what I bake, I bake more. At a company I worked at in my 20s and 30s, people would literally follow me into the kitchen if I came to work with blondies or lemon bars. The next couple of companies I worked for, I would often end up throwing away some of what I brought in because it was still sitting in the breakroom at the end of the day and, unlike (seemingly) everyone else, I didn’t bake much during COVID because how much were two people really going to eat? Even now, I want to try new flavors and techniques, but that food still needs somewhere to go.

Anyway, I have baked a lot of pies in the last two and half years and I’m always a little surprised at how finicky pastry crust is. I have really struggled with even rolling, which honestly, seems like not a huge deal, but leads to difficulty baking evenly. I have also struggled on and off with a lot of shrinking and butter leakage.

I have come around to deciding the letting the crust rest before and after it’s rolled out is extremely important. While in theory you can roll it out after 30ish minutes in the refrigerator, I think that the minimum should be two hours and overnight is best. I hate to say this because I want pie to be simpler and quicker than it is, but sometimes we want optimum results over simplicity, and those times I think require an overnight chill (or 6-8 hours). I also think that the chill after it is rolled is more important than it seems. I have started chilling for 20-30 minutes once it’s in the pie tin, and another 20-30 minutes after it is crimped.

One of the most common things I hear when it comes to baking is that your hands are your best tools. While I don’t entirely disagree, I have really come to embrace the pastry cutter in incorporating butter in my crusts! I think it has helped so much with butter leakage. I still start with my hands by flattening the butter pieces, but once all the butter is smooshed, I use the pastry cutter to incorporate the butter. I do think that this might sacrifice a bit of the flakiness, but I think the tradeoff of not pulling out a butter filled baking sheet 20% of the time is worth it.

Here is my latest pie! It’s a chocolate pudding pie, from Smitten Kitchen. So delicious, not to sweet! As you can see, I am working on my piping skills.

I also did some baking for another bake sale that my cat rescue hosted. I suffered an incredible sprinkles tragedy. I bought four bags of red and pink sprinkles and three of the bags were rancid. I was so upset and tried to fix the situation by doing the truly bananas thing of picking red, pink and white sprinkles from a multicolored pack. It took me way too long to realize that was not feasible before I gave in and made non-seasonally colored confetti cookies.

On the other hand, my cat brownie and blondies came out better than I had hoped! I cut the brownies frozen and the blondies refrigerated (the blondies had mix-ins that I think would have made it even harder to cut if frozen). I loved how they turned out! The blondies are chonky cats. :)