Pie Trials
I just have to share this experience. I signed up for a Pie-Off at work. It’s taking place on Monday. All week I’ve been obsessing over what pies I am going to enter. The rules are quite simple. We can only enter 2 pies and they have to be in a pie pan. Other than that, it’s whatever we want.
The judging categories are: Best Overall, Most Colorful, Most Creative, Best Traditional, Best Combo (ie with ice cream). Keep in mind I’m not really a pie girl. I made these lemon meringue cup-pies, but other than that, I stick with other baked goods. But I do love a challenge, so here I am…
Tonight I wanted to make some trial pies. But Hubby and I don’t need two pies in the house. And I don’t want to send a pie to work with a piece or two cut out of it. I have actually never eaten a pear (shocking, I know!) but this pear-cranberry pie from Katie looked so festive and I thought I might have a shot at Most Colorful with it. The other pie I wanted to try is from Dorie Greenspans “Baking From My Home to Yours” as made famous by the TWD group. (BTW, I grabbed the cookbook at TJMaxx for $24 and man it’s HEAVY! I didn’t realize it was so big!). So the other pie is called Depths-of-Fall Butternut Squash Pie. It has butternut squash, pears, dried cranberries and walnuts in it. And the squash isn’t pureed like a pumpkin pie, it’s left in chunks. This intrigued me.
So back to tonight. I wanted to make 2 pies without having 2 pies at the end of the night. Then I got this crazy idea to make them both in the same pan. Yep, you read right. In the same pan. The squash pie needed a double crust and the pear pie is open on the top. So I used two crusts and just folded one in half for the squash pie and then cut the other crust in half for the pear pie. The pictures show it better…
This is the filling for the Dorie Pie. Let me tell you – I wanted to eat this with a spoon. But I decided I should bake the pie as planned.
This is the pear filling. Quite simple and tasty. I couldn’t get it all to fit in the 1/2 pie pan so I ate the rest. Mmmm. I had no idea I liked pears so much.
Here’s the Dorie pie in it’s crust. As you can see, it’s one pie crust (yes, I used store bought for tonight – I’ll be making homemade for Monday). I just folded the top over the filling and crimped with a fork.
Here’s the pie after I crimped the edge of the Dorie pie. I left enough pie for the pear pie to have crust on all sides so the juices wouldn’t get mixed into the Dorie pie.
Here’s the other half of the pear pie crust. I used some mini leaf cookie cutters to cut out the decorations just like Katie.
This is the pie as it looked before it went in the oven. As you can see, the pear half of the pie is quite full. One difficult thing about this project is the cooking time/temp. One said 400 and one said 375. I heated my oven to about 385 and threw it in. The pear pie required being loosely covered with foil.
Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy these. It had all my favourite flavours, so I thought they would be delicious but I had a feeling whilst making they were going to be too sweet, and they were.
Also the base definitely needs increasing as half the mix barely covers the bottom of the tin and with two wet elements it needs to be sturdier. Whilst the side pieces all stayed together the middle ones were just a gooey mess.
But still didn’t detract from the biggest issue – far too sweet. (And I have plenty a sweet tooth!)
Lovely blog though! (Sorry, hate leaving negative feedback! I just wouldn’t want someone else to have the same issues. Also, tinned pumpkin is quite pricey in the UK so wouldn’t want others to waste money on a recipe that doesn’t work)
beantownbaker — December 26th, 2013 @ 11:02 am
Sorry to hear this recipe didn’t work out for you… Thanks for the feedback.
I’m going to try these. I think Brits don’t generally eat things as sweet as we do and I read the recipe and it doesn’t seem as if it has too much sugar, but I am going to double the crust recipe because it does seem as if it is a bit scant, plus I’m going to make a double batch. Tell me, do these have to be stored in the fridge? I see the note to put in fridge to set. Are they too soft at room temp? If so, do you think not adding the milk to the dulce de leche would take care of that? I’m bringing them to an event and there will be no refrigeration available.