For the Love of Pie

Dessert is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It allows me to bake, and ply Dede full of sweets. Pie is his favorite, especially berry pie. In our household, there is berry pie all year long. Mostly this is because berries are another fruit staple in our household. And when they desperately need to be used, there are two ways to use berries. The first is my mother's way, cook all the fruit in the household into "fruit soup" which is just hot fruit juice. The second is my way, make berry pie. I use whatever it is that we have in the fridge, which is why my berry pie always comes out different, and why there is no exact measurement for how many berries you will need. Now I'm not actually going to post a pie crust recipe (yet again!) because I haven't yet found one that I liked. I used to make mine with shortening, but a close friend swore up and down that cream cheese was the way to go. Obviously I must continue to tinker about in the kitchen until I find the flaky crust of my dreams.

Berry Crumble

Freeform Berry Pie

Use your favorite pie crust recipe, or a pre-bought pie crust.

All the berries in your fridge that need to be eaten

1 cup of sugar, or 1/2 cup of fruit jam/preserves

1/4 cup orange juice (if you don't have any, just use water)

Instructions

Wash, drain, and cut all the berries

Combine the berries, juice, and sugar in a large saucepan over medium heat

Cook over medium heat for 10-15 minutes, just to break down the berries and release their juices. Take the berries off the heat and drain, making sure the reserve the liquid in another bowl. Toss the berries with a little flour or cornstarch and sugar before filling your pie crust. Usually I have plenty of berries leftover, so I put them back in the pot with the reserve liquid over medium heat to continue to break down. You want to cook the remaining berries down until the liquid has thickened to make preserves. This usually takes another 30-40 minutes, but you could speed this process up by adding a roux, or a little cornstarch to the pot. If you only have the reserve liquid left, it makes a great mixer for drinks, or add cornstarch to make a jelly.

* If you opt not to use sugar, but to clean out some old jars of jam, then whisk the jam until smooth with the juice or water first before adding to the berries in the pot.

How to top your pie: as pictured above, you could use a crumble topping. If you bought pre-prepared pie tins, then a crumble is a great solution. It's simple butter, sugar, and flour. I used a crumble mix since I already had one on hand. If you bought pie crusts, then obviously you can use the second pie crust to seal off the pie. Bake at 375 deg. F on a sheet pan (it will catch any juices bubbling over) for 40 minutes

There are also a few ways in which pie can also be very romantic (and I don't just mean sliding a ring into the pie). You can top the pie with cookies, we often like to use the pre-cut pillsbury sugar cookies that have images printed on them (you can use them for different occasions like Easter pie, or Halloween pie as well). Since cookies require less time to bake, bake the pie halfway first, take it out of the oven and slide the cookies on top, put back in the oven and continue to bake.

Love pie, using the pre-cut pillsbury valentine cookies

Last, but not least, proposal pie ...

I used shortbread cookies and cut the letters into the shortbread squares

Actually, it was more of a crumble. I came up with this during the summer when I had some extra shortbread cookie dough left over. Dede had been brainstorming for many months on how to propose, and taking pitying on the poor man, I came up with this idea. Not that this is actually how he proposed, but he was so happy when he saw it. It also happened to provide good inspiration for a proposal blog post.

And this is how we ate the proposal pie, in a mug with a big scoop of ice cream