Posted by Deanna. Comments from Tisha in orange, comments from Sharyl in pink.
3 chicks, baking. We can all now call ourselves pie makers. Gotta love how the kitchen smells while we cook. : )
I’ve been a baker for most of my life. Deanna is a great baker. She makes yummy things all the time and lucky for us, she shares them! Cookies, cakes, brownies, bring it on. But I’ve never made pie crust before because, frankly, it’s a rather intimidating prospect. The cutting in the cold butter and using ice water all screams “you’ll screw this up!” so I’ve never tried. Then Ben came along and offered up a foolproof pie crust recipe. No ice water and no cold butter. Just some flour, sugar, salt and oil. Anyone can make this pie crust and it actually turns out to be a pie crust! Mixing it up was super easy, Lil Chick Z actually made 2 of the crusts mostly by herself. I have made lots of pie crusts before because my Mom taught me how. However, I bowed to her because she made such good ones. She is a legend in her own mind, I mean family, for making an extremely good Lemon Meringue Pie. Both Mom and Dad worked in bakeries and had lots of experience.
And we're rolling and we're rolling
The rolling out took a little trial and error. Roll, Roll, Roll your dough. We were supposed to roll it out between 2 sheets of wax paper but it actually took about 4 sheets because wax paper is only so wide and the rolled out crust ended up wider than a single sheet. Note to self: invent a wider wax paper! Then came the flipping and getting it into the pie plate. Lo and behold, it worked. I just bought myself a new pie plate (show off) at Target because I couldn’t find my old one. It’s a monster size pie plate so the crust didn’t go up and over the rim like it was supposed to but that’s ok, I wasn’t planning on entering the pie into any beauty contests.(Just entering her mouth)
Mom, who has made many a pie crust, had no problems with covering her pie plate and getting all fancy with the “fluting” of the edges. Show off. Of course, her pie plate was a baby compared to mine, so she had it easy. We had Papa Bear(D), Mama Bear(T) and Baby Bear(me) plates.
Pricked the crusts with a fork and into the oven they go. Beautiful golden flakiness emerged to cool on the counter. Then came the filling.
Tisha went first with chocolate creamy goodness. The filling recipe is the same, no matter what flavor of pie you want to make, we just had to omit the cocoa powder if we wanted something other than chocolate. The filling thickened up pretty quickly and into the cooled crust it goes. And guess what? It looked like an actual pie! I have to admit that this looked and tasted pretty darn good!
I went next with banana cream. Left out the cocoa, as I mentioned and mixed in about 3 mashed bananas. Another banana gave it’s life to line the bottom of the pie crust.
Lil Chick Z really got into mashing up the bananas
We decided that I should double the filling recipe because of my massive pie plate. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a bad idea. The pie ended up never setting, I think because there was just too much filling. Or my heaping tablespoons of flour were not heaping enough. So, I really ended up with banana pudding with pieces of pie crust in it. Which is not a bad thing, but it’s not banana cream pie. Next time, no doubling the filling, it’ll just have to have a smaller ratio of filling to crust. More room for whipped cream!! I love this picture of your pie Deanna with the cut bananas at the bottom. Looks professional!
Mom made a chocolate cream pie as well. This one set up no problem at all and it was really good
.Of course! Nice chocolate taste and super smooth and creamy. Lil Dude G really liked the “chocolate pudding” in the pie crust. Famous G quote " I LIKE chocolate".
.Of course! Nice chocolate taste and super smooth and creamy. Lil Dude G really liked the “chocolate pudding” in the pie crust. Famous G quote " I LIKE chocolate".
Lil Chick Z used one of the pie crusts that she made to make cinnamon sugar cookies. She rolled out the dough, sprinkled on sugar and cinnamon and dotted the whole thing with butter. Then it was rolled up into a log shape and sliced into rounds (Granny helped her with this part). The cookies end up looking like little miniature cinnamon rolls. This is not a recipe from Ben’s book, just something from the family recipe vault. Papa LOVED Z's cookies. Guess I will have to make some more : )
Lil Chick Z says: "Hi, I made these cookies out of pie crust. They were easy to make. They taste good." She really got into helping us this time, much more than ever before.
The end result. Yummy!
Next time, we'll be down a Chick. But never fear, we will carry on. We'll be attempting quiche. Oh my.Lions and Tigers and Quiche, OH MY !! Tisha has decided that she needs a vacation (from us) so is going away for a week. Lucky girl!! We will try to persevere without her but she shall be missed.
We are finding that cooking can be fairly expensive when just doing it by yourself. We are splitting all the ingredients 3 ways, so we can try new things that might other wise be too expensive to prepare on our own. Having said that, none of this has been overly expensive, just different ingredients than I usually have at home in my cupboards. I have made a Ben's Shelf to put all the things that we use when preparing Ben's recipes. Did I mention he is OUR MASTER CHEF?? HA HA HA Great fun ladies! Enjoy your quiche next time!
We are finding that cooking can be fairly expensive when just doing it by yourself. We are splitting all the ingredients 3 ways, so we can try new things that might other wise be too expensive to prepare on our own. Having said that, none of this has been overly expensive, just different ingredients than I usually have at home in my cupboards. I have made a Ben's Shelf to put all the things that we use when preparing Ben's recipes. Did I mention he is OUR MASTER CHEF?? HA HA HA Great fun ladies! Enjoy your quiche next time!
