I submitted my pies to the county fair this morning. Yesterday was an exhausting day, and I’m proud that I completed my pies. My intention going into the baking weekend was to spread out the tasks a bit more, but, as with most things, life got in the way.
I did make the dough on Friday, so it had a lot of time to rest before I started rolling and baking.
On Saturday, I made the plum filling and caramelized the onions for the tart. But, as soon as I was done with the onions, I realized I had forgotten the herbs, so I had to redo the onions. If you’ve ever caramelized onions, you know that’s a real bummer, because it takes at least an hour. So, we got more onions and I redid them on Sunday morning.
I didn’t parbake/blind bake the crusts until Sunday, and given the constraints of my kitchen, I did one at a time. The reason is, per a lot of professional bakers advice, I use a baking steel for my pie crusts and only one pie fits on the baking steel. In retrospect, I wish I had done that on Saturday, but I just ran out of time.
So, I went into Sunday with dough made and chilled, and my plum filling done. As an aside, we are hiking in Mt. Rainier in a couple of weeks and to prepare for that, we did a 5 mile hike Sunday morning. That ended up not the best way to start a day that was going to be a lot of standing in the kitchen.
Sunday morning I redid the onions and parbaked the crust for the plum pie. I then moved on to parbaking the crust for the tart, making the custard, baking the tart and blind baking the crust for the coconut cream pie. Here is the tart without the custard:
Once that was all done, I took a break. The Coconut Cream Pie is a cold filling pie, so I wanted to make it in the evening, so it was as fresh as reasonably possible.
After a dinner and tv break, I made the coconut cream filling and got the crust filled and with that I was done for the day!
I woke up early this morning to toast the coconut and whip the cream, and then it was time to finish assembling the pie and get them delivered. I ended up whipping the cream with a hand mixer, which split the difference between using the stand mixer and doing by had. I think it was the right decision! It was very nicely whipped.
Here are the three final pies.
I have thoughts about what went well and what didn’t with both the process and the pies, and I will write about that later, but I am most pleased with the coconut cream pie. Obviously a downside to pies is that you can’t try them, although I did try all of the fillings and am happy with how they turned out.
We delivered them to the Orange County Fair early this morning. I’ll let you know what the results are!
More to come!!