The First Pie of Spring

This feels like the longest winter in history. It’s just never-ending.  I’ve been so busy since I last posted in November that most of this never-ending winter has seemed to pass by quickly, but it still feels as if it should be over by now. 

I spent part of the winter watching old episodes of Pushing Daisies each evening, a TV show that came on a few years ago about a piemaker named Ned who has the magical ability to bring dead people, animals, and plants back to life, with the catch being that he can’t touch them again or he will kill them forever. On the show, they always showed images of huge mouth-watering pies displayed in Ned’s pie shop, the Pie Hole, in the background. My favourite part of the show was when Ned’s brought-back-to-life girlfriend, Chuck (a.k.a. Charlotte) would bake pies with gruyère cheese baked into the crust and homeopathic liquid antidepressants dropped into the filling for her two mourning, cheese-loving aunts, who didn't know that she had returned from the dead. Chuck would make the pies and then have them secretly delivered to her aunts to cheer them up.

I don’t know that this winter has been bad enough to start baking antidepressants into my desserts (although putting cheese in the crust is something I definitely have to try), but in my attempt to will spring into existence, I decided to make the first pie of spring today.

It’s apple, peach and blueberry. I made half of my favourite Perfect Pie Crust recipe and I used the leftover pie dough to cut out flower and leaf shapes. I baked these on a separate baking sheet and then placed them on top of the pie once I took it out of the oven to cool.

This pie reminded me of some pies that I made in December: a Christmas chicken and broccoli pie and some starry lemon mini tarts.

For the Christmas chicken pie, I cut out small Christmas shapes (snowmen, reindeer, and stars) and baked them separately for a few minutes on a baking sheet, and then added them to the top of the pie once it came out of the oven, just like I did with the spring pie. The pie filling was made of chicken, broccoli, mushrooms, onions, garlic, milk and cheese, with flour to thicken, that was cooked ahead of time before being added to the crust.

I also made starry lemon mini tarts.

I made my own lemon curd for the tarts. These tarts were made to look like traditional British Christmas mince pies with the star on top, which I’ve never made and never tasted. There’s something about the word “mince” that turns me off. I’ve never seen mincement in the stores and I don’t know if I want to make it myself. I think I’d like to try these little tarts with a chocolate filling. Maybe Nutella with chopped, toasted hazelnuts mixed in.  Hazelnuts are pretty Christmassy.

Looking at these pictures of my Christmas pies reminds me that I still have a bunch of photos of Christmas food from last year that I haven’t had a chance to share. When I get time, I will post them. Hopefully before next Christmas.

And in case you are still digging out from this long, miserable winter and don't have access to a pie with cheese and antidepressants baked into it, here’s something that’s sure to help brighten up your day: a Mini Maestro from Kyrgyzstan who takes her conducting very seriously and very cutely.

A Spring Snow Day with a Whiff of Christmas

While there’s definitely a part of me that wants spring to just hurry up and get here already, I’m not going to complain about this completely unexpected snow day, especially when I was able to spend most of it curled up on the couch in my office/craft room listening to the Strokes. How decadent it feels to have a day off that’s not full of chores or scheduled things to do, which is what I normally do when I have a planned day off from work.

A couple of days ago, I finally found an aptly named Perfect Pie Crust recipe, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because now I can make pies with amazingly buttery, flaky crust. Bad because now all I want to do is make pies. On Wednesday after I got home from work, I used the newfound recipe to make an Unintentionally Greek quiche of sorts out of spinach, onions, garlic, red pepper, feta cheese and eggs, just the things that were close to going bad in my fridge, like my Unintentionally Italian soup that I made over a month ago.

Later that same night I made a coconut cream pie, following this recipe for the filling. The Perfect Pie Crust recipe makes enough for two bottom-only pies or tarts, or in this case a quiche and a pie.





I toasted the coconut first and doubled the amount. I also doubled the vanilla, which I always do for every dessert recipe that calls for vanilla, and I added a drop of coconut extract. I used the same Perfect Pie Crust recipe (baked it blind and let it cool), which has no sugar in it, but it was fine for this pie, a nice complement to the sweet coconut custard. Half of this recipe with the doubled coconut is enough to fill one pie shell, but I only made it with custard, not whipped cream on top like most coconut cream pies because even I impose some limits on dessert decadence. Except for eating a slice of the pie for breakfast. That level of decadence is well within my limits, particularly on a rare early spring snow day when it seems as if anything goes.

As I already said, the problem with finding the perfect pie crust recipe is that now all I want to do is make pies. The crust is so easy to make and turns out so perfectly that I have no excuse not to make a pie (or two!) every day for the rest of my life. Except for my waistline, of course. What I want to conquer next is one of those fancy fruit flans, a classic tarte aux fruits, with the multi-coloured concentric circles of fresh fruit on top.

I want to try my hand at making a pavlova at some point, too. I had never even heard of pavlova until I watched Nigella Lawson make one on her Forever Summer series on TV. It's a big baked meringue dessert, essentially. I could watch Nigella cook and bake for hours on end. Nigella’s Bribery and Corruption Drawer, her cupboard full of chocolate and treats in her kitchen, is the sort of thing that I would have myself in my own kitchen if I only had more willpower. I have a strong feeling that the only person who would be corrupted by having a big ol' stash of chocolate in the house is me. I just think the incongruence of the beautiful, sophisticated, food-writer Nigella showing us her cupboard full of junk is hilarious, which is why I like her.

Speaking of incongruence, and seeing as how nothing screams “early spring snowstorm” like a dark Christmas fruitcake (ha!), I baked a fruitcake today. Not one of those boozey, pudding-like concoctions that you have to bake a year in advance and then put in a dark cupboard and feed it a spoonful of booze every day until Christmas or anything. No, that process sounds too much like something out of a Dickens novel for my tastes, like some poor, alcoholic orphan-child confined to a dank corner of the workhouse, languishing from lack of sunlight and nutrition, kept docile with an occasional dram of gin. I don't know why my brain automatically makes that association between  fruitcake and Victorian-era orphans, but it does.





This doesn't look like an drunken orphan to me at all, not with all those blackberries and my best attempt at fancy-pants piped icing, which is actually light Cool Whip.

Anyway, I had dried cherries, prunes, raisins and a handful of dried cranberries that had been kicking around for ages in my cupboard, along with two slices of crystallized ginger that have been in my spice basket for as long as I can remember. No nuts, though; I didn’t have any. So I modified a recipe that I found online, chucked everything that I could find in, and there you go. It's moist and spicy now but I bet after a couple of days in the container, it will be even awesomer.

The only issue with it occurred when I turned the cake out of the loaf pan when part of the bottom stuck to the pan, but in retrospect, maybe if I had better prepared the pan before pouring in the batter, like with greased parchment paper or something, then it could have helped the cake from sticking. Then again, I’m sure that everything that I did—i.e. baking a dark fruit cake in late March, not making it the traditional way, using old dried-up odds and ends from the back of my baking cupboard, and eating it with (gasp!) blackberries and light Cool Whip, of all things--is highly disreputable and violates every sense of propriety that most sensible bakers have, but I don’t care because, guess what?! The cake is delicious and it's a snow day in Spring and my house smells like Christmas! It’s that unmistakable smell of happiness and home and coziness and the prospect of exciting things just around the corner. You just can’t get that happy smell out of a bottle, so even if it is technically "spring," I’ll take a whiff of Christmas whenever I can get it.