After the success of my invented strawberry pie filling a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a full-sized version this week.

I followed most of my mom’s tips for pastry and I have to admit, it worked really well this week. The bit of extra liquid (6 tablespoons instead of my usual 4) made the dough very soft, and it rolled out so easily and was very workable. The one thing I didn’t do was make it with milk – I used water instead on the off chance that the Captain would want to try it. The finished result was okay – better than my past few efforts, I would say, but you can really taste the difference the milk makes, I think. My version bakes up okay but just isn’t as flavourful as my mother’s.

Here’s the filling going in. It’s made from around 5-6 cups of chopped strawberries, 1 cup sugar (I think I’d use 3/4 cup next time), 1/4 cup flour, and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon.

Then I baked it at 375, even though my mother specficially told me to bake pies at 400. I have no explanation or defense for my actions – I was just afraid of burning. My oven bakes a little hot and my mother’s bakes a little cool and so I think it probably balanced out.

It doens’t look like much, does it? I think I need to experiment with some pastry cut-outs or sprinkles of sugar or something to make my pies look a little more dynamic.

Here’s a shot of the last slice left.

So I think this pie was good. I made it for ladies’ poker night and everyone had some and I had lots of compliments. I like the strawberry pie filling very much, but I personally was disappointed – after last weekend’s visit with my mom I expected major improvements in the taste of my crusts. I’d give this one a B at best.

I’m going to try this pie one more time this coming weekend – I’m hosting a lunch for FameThrowa’s fiancee’s parents, and I think it will make a nice summery dessert. We’ll see if I can crank it up to an A.

In other news, while making this pie I also made three dozen banana mini-muffins, and this adorable mini-sized birthday cake for MyFriendJen:

Now the cake? Was super yum. I was trying for that prototypical birthday cake with the pink icing and the sprinkles and I was happy with the way it turned out. It’s a keeper!

I had Easter dinner at my mother’s house this past weekend. It was a particularly auspicious occasion since all three of my sisters were there with their families, and it’s fairly rare these days for all four of us to be in one place at the same time.

So of course, my mom had made pie. Four pies, actually.

Much like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, believing he was ready to face Darth Vader even though incomplete was his training, I swaggered into my mom’s house ready to taste test. I thought, hey, I’ve been making pies for four months now, I’ve got it. I’m ready to see how I stack up against the real thing.

And I got served. Pun intended. I was lucky to emerge without being frozen in carbonite.

My mother’s pie is way, way, way, way better than mine. Sir Monkeypants and I both were like, OH RIGHT, this is how pie is supposed to be! How silly of us.

On Sunday, I talked my mom into making yet another pie with me and I learned about a thousand things I have been doing wrong. She makes her pastry with milk, not water; she bakes her pies at 400 degrees, not 375; she greases the pie plate before loading in the pastry (doh, that seems so obvious now!).

The biggest difference, though, is that she uses much more liquid in her pastry mix than I have been. She freaked me out by dumping at least a half cup of milk in there all at once, and then mixing it up to a nice soft lump like PlayDoh. I’ve been under the impression that the least amount of liquid, the better, and I painstakingly measure out two scant tablespoons of water each time and sprinkle the water ever-so-delicately over the entire thing, until it barely clings together. Apparently, wrong. At least, according to Yoda.

Also my rolling methods leave a lot to be desired, not a surprise. And I don’t use enough sugar in my apple pie filling. And I should use water to seal the edges of the pie, and my mom’s style of crimping is way more effective and faster, and I need to work on my vent cutting technique.

GAH.

So I made an apple pie with my mom, and it was thisclose to being as good as hers, with her close supervision, of course. Here it is (with leftover cherry and apple pie in the background from the previous night’s dinner):

I like it that my mom cuts a 9-inch pie into only six pieces. Because that’s the way pie should clearly be served. Testify!

So my mother remains the master, and I’m back in basic training. I’m smarting, but I’ll be making another pie this week anyway and we’ll see how it turns out.

I didn’t make a pie post last week, because I remade a pie I’d made before — this Peach Blueberry Pie. It turned out better this time around, I think, although there were the usual issues. I made sure to completely thaw the peaches this time, so they’d cook through, but it turned out that thawing them made a LOT of extra liquid in the filling mix. I was afraid it wouldn’t set up, so I ended up scooping out the peaches and blueberries and putting them in with a minimum of liquid. It worked, in that the pie cooked and the filling wasn’t running all over the place, but it also wasn’t as sweet as last time, so not quite as tasty in my book.

Also, while I was working on the lattice top, Little Miss Sunshine was upstairs decidedly NOT napping. So I was putting down a strip of lattice, then going to the bottom of the stairs to tell the Little Miss to get back in bed, then doing two more strips of lattice, then going upstairs to put her back in the bed, then doing another strip of lattice, then yelling at her to just come down already, and as a result, I put the pie in the oven when the lattice was only half done. OOPS. I know this is a minor thing and really not a big deal at all but for some reason I was kind of upset about it so I didn’t even take a photo. PMS, I’m thinking.

So, on to this week! This week I am trying something new – miniature pies. This is a throwback to my youth, when my mother would make enough pastry dough for three or four pies at a time, and use the leftovers to make a small pie, the size of a meat pie. My sisters and I used to fight over the mini-pie, so eventually my mom started to make one miniature pie for each of us. Then she’d put the pie in our school lunch bag for the next day, and all the kids and teachers would drool as we ate a whole pie.

Oh, man, GOOD TIMES.

I started with the pastry. I had no idea how much to make. I ended up making enough for four single crusts (4 cups cake and pastry flour, 1 1/3 cups shortening, 1 teaspoon salt, just less than 8 tablespoons water), but that was more than enough for the five pies I was planning on. I could easily have made at least seven, maybe eight if I rolled the pastry out thin.

Anyway, I rolled it out and cut circles for the tops and bottoms using a bowl as a pattern and a sharp knife. I put the bottom halves into five meat pie plates:

Although the pastry rolled out well, working it into the cups was very fiddly, and round about now I was cursing this idea and thinking this had no chance of working. Plus I kind of wrecked my knee doing Wii Fit Rhythm Kung Fu (I rock, I challenge YOU ALL), and I was getting annoyed at how long it I had to stand there trying to whip the pastry into submission.

Tip, if you’re going to make these: don’t bother to preheat the oven until the pastry is rolled and cut. Otherwise, your oven will be twiddling its thumbs and wondering why you never did buy it that iPhone you promised so it could text all its other oven friends while waiting FOREVER for your stupid pies. Trust me.

Then I made up some fillings. I cannot believe how casual I was with these fillings, people. I am the ultimate in follow the recipe, I must know the exact amounts of everything. Don’t be giving me no recipes where you throw in a little of this and a blob of that. NO. I need numbers, and details, and hand-holding all the way.

But for these, I just kind of threw some things in a bowl. I KNOW. I went nuts!

Three pies are apple – I used one apple per mini-pie. Then I added around 1/4 cup sugar (to the three apples, peeled and cut into very small cubes), a couple teaspoon-sized scoops of flour, and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon. The other two pies are strawberry – I used around 2 cups of chopped up strawberries with 1/4 cup sugar, a heaping tablespoon of flour, and a very small sprinkle of cinnamon.

Then the fillings went in and the tops went on:

By this time my hair was grey, I’d lost all my teeth, and had two hip replacements. FIDDLY.

I baked them at 375 for 40 minutes, although I could have taken them out five minutes earlier, I think. Very important to rotate the pies around in the oven a few times, and also to bake them on a cookie sheet for your own sanity.

They came out looking pretty good, actually. I took two pictures because in the first one, they just look like a bunch of normal sized pies, don’t you think? So I stuck my hand in there for sizing.

And then we ate them.

OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY.

Here’s Sir Monkeypants enjoying his apple pie:

They are so good. Amazing. The best pies I’ve ever made. I can’t even decide which I like better. The strawberry is like a giant candy. The apple is exactly like the ones I had in my lunches as a child.

I’m so very, very happy right now.

This weekend I’ll be seeing my mom and she’ll be making pies. Hopefully I can learn something, but at the very least I think I can stand beside her in the kitchen and maybe even (gasp!) help.

The piemaker dream lives! It’s ALIVE!!