fiftypiestreet

[fiftypiestreet]

Lemon Tart 2: Redemption was a great success!

As you may recall, last time I tried to make lemon tart it was an unmitigated disaster.  Well, I made several changes this time around.  Used a completely different recipe - Stephanie Alexander's recipe, to be exact, as recommended by a friend who'd actually used it before - and went with frozen shortcrust pastry instead of making my own.  I thought it would be less depressing if this attempt was as much of a disaster as last time if I hadn't spent ages carefully making the crust as well as all the rest.  Frozen pastry is often tougher than homemade, and this is no exception, plus my blind baking still needs work, but the crust is perfectly edible.

I left off trimming the pastry until after I'd blind baked it, because I read that as a tip for fighting shrinkage, and it worked!  The crust shrank a little when I baked it with the filling in (which just kind of shows it was underdone on the blind bake) but only slightly, and there was enough room for all the filling in the crust!  Yay!

The actual lemon filling is gorgeous.  It's just lemons (juice and zest), eggs, sugar and cream, that's it.  And it's SO GOOD.  It baked evenly without puffing up or browning (I suspect my oven was too hot last time) and has set to a lovely creamy, wobbly consistency.  It's gloriously lemony and not too sweet, but not quite eye-wateringly tart either.  And so pretty!

I was impatient and cut a slice while it was still warm, so I can only imagine how good it will be once it's chilled properly.  And lemon tart is one of my favourites, so it's nice to know I can actually make one after all!  It'll be even better with a sweet homemade shortcrust, next time.

[fiftypiestreet]

Ermagerd, melktert! Sorry, I’ve been giggling about that every time I thought about making this South African milk tart (or melktert, as it is called in Afrikaans) this weekend.  I’ve never tasted anyone else’s milk tart before making this one, but I wanted to try something custardy this week so I followed this recipe from Kitchen Vixen.  I lazily substituted store-bought puff pastry for the biscuit base in the recipe because pastry (puff or shortcrust) seems to be an equally acceptable crust across all the recipes I looked at.  Apparently the internet is divided on which is more traditional! It puffed up like CRAZY in the oven because of all the eggs, and then sank down as it cooled.  I’m not sure if it’s supposed to do that, but I’m also not really sure how you stop egg custard from puffing as it bakes anyway. As for the eating, it reminds me of a less eggy, more cinnamony version of the Hong Kong style egg custard tarts you get at yum cha restaurants; sweet, soft custard in a light flaky pastry shell.  Yum!  Mine should have been baked a little longer, the pastry is a bit anaemic and it’s disappointingly soggy on the bottom, but a slightly longer baking time would make this just perfect.  It’s creamy and wobbly and very delicious.  I think I will definitely try again in future, with a slightly longer baking time.

[fiftypiestreet]

I actually made this pie last week but somehow I completely failed to post about it.  The hardest thing about this blog most weeks is working out what I can SAY about the pies.  I mean, eh.  It’s a pie.  Tasted pretty good.  Nothing very weird happened while I was making it.  Not much to say, really. This one is French Onion pie, based on another blogger’s…well…account of following a recipe that is behind a subscription wall (you might want to subscribe for all the details but I didn’t bother because I am lazy).  It’s basically a quiche with a lot of caramelised onion and bacon on top.  My pans were a little too hot, so I accidentally took the caramelisation a little further than the other blogger, but it didn’t hurt the flavour at all, it’s just not as pretty looking. I still haven’t worked out how to blind bake a crust without it shrinking (supposedly it’s from over working the dough but I was so careful with this one) but at least this crust came out pretty even if it was a little smaller than the pan!

[fiftypiestreet]

DISASTER.

For the first time in seventeen pies, a slice of pie has met its end not in the usual way but on my living room floor.  What a tragedy.

This chicken and leek pie was excellent, though.  So excellent that there is now none of it left, which isn’t bad for three people and one meal (even with the sacrificial floor pie taken into account).  But it is sad for me, because now I have to think of something else to have for lunch tomorrow.  In a wildly out of character move, I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except the thyme got left out and I made my own pie crust (totally worth it, look how pretty it is).  I recommend it!  It goes together easy but with enough chopping and stirring to make you feel like you’re properly cooking, and it tastes fantastic.

The thyme got left out because I am horribly, revoltingly, exhaustingly ill with a really bad cold at the moment.  I was so overcome with feverish delirium at the supermarket this morning that I left the shopping list at home, laughed so hard at a faulty security buzzer that I ended up in tears, and also forgot to bring home any thyme.  I maybe…don’t recommend that so much.

[fiftypiestreet]

Who says pie has to be a lot of work?  I am having a lazy Saturday and using up some leftovers from the freezer to make a quick and easy pie lunch.  Frozen pastry and leftover filling from last week’s lasagne for the win!  The filling’s a little loose for a pie, but they taste great, and I didn’t have to chop anything.  WINNING. They’re in party pie form partly to accommodate the sloppy filling and partly because this weekend is the inaugural weekend of the Australian Football League’s Women’s competition!  AFLW had their first season game last night, in front of a lockout crowd, and I’m still on a high over seeing women’s sports history being made.  Another go at the footy pie I made for the men’s Grand Final last year seemed appropriate. This one’s got more veggies in it, though.  Extra vitamins for smashing the patriarchy :P

[fiftypiestreet]

This week’s banoffee pie was an oddly successful failure.  I’m told failure is a normal part of learning new things, but I’m not sure I trust it, so failures that are indistinguishable from successes in the end are my favourite kind. Hey, this pie isn’t American!  Banoffee pie (also known as bananoffe pie, if you listen to Wikipedia, but I’m not sure I trust that either) is English, invented in living memory by a chef called Ian Dowding at a restaurant that no longer exists.  So there you go, you learned something today.  I’d never eaten it before I made it, and there are so many variations on the recipe that I’m not completely convinced I have made or eaten it even now, but what I did make was pretty good so…winning? I started off with a chocolate pie crust, my normal recipe with a bit of sugar and cocoa added.  Maybe too much cocoa in any other context, as it’s got a very strong and slightly bitter flavour, but since the filling is so sweet I think that’s actually a bonus.  Unfortunately, because the filling on this pie doesn’t get cooked in the crust, I had to blind bake it and that did not go well!  Not only did it shrink by almost a centimetre all the way around (!) one of the sides got caught while it was shrinking and ripped a hole in the crust.  So I won’t be winning any prizes with this one, but never fear, I just glued it back together with caramel.  My shameful secret is safe. Because of the shrinkage problem, the crust ended up much shallower than I was expecting, so the “grown up” chocolate banoffee pie recipe I was originally planning to go with wouldn’t have fit in there.  I cooked the banana slices in a frypan with butter and sugar to caramelise them a bit and then went with covering them in caramel (top and fill, I’m lazy) and topping with a perfectly ordinary vanilla whipped cream and dark chocolate shavings.  Much less rich than the original plan, which honestly is probably a good thing.  I was a bit too stingy with the caramel, but it’s still intensely sweet, so it’s definitely a small slice kind of pie.  Since I’m…apparently not that into sweet things?   I may have chosen the wrong theme for my cooking project

[fiftypiestreet]

Wow, I took a month off and everything went crazy around here.  Hello to all my new followers!  I actually made three pies over Christmas, two cherry pies and one egg nog tart, but I was too lazy and busy to bother photographing them.  Also there are only so many cherry pies a person can look at before they become boring.  I mean, theoretically.  I have yet to reach that number, but I’m sure it exists. Today’s midweek mini pie is brought to you by a terrible head cold, a day off work, and a gigantic box of organic nectarines that got delivered to my household last week.  I figured I should make 'em small, since probably cooking for other people while you have the plague is a bit of a faux pas, and I wasn’t sure I could eat a whole pie myself.  Having actually tasted this, though, I reckon I could.  It’s sooo goooood. The nectarines are sweet and juicy and perfect, and I added just a little sugar, a splash of bourbon and a drizzle of maple syrup to make the sauce for the filling, plus a couple of tablespoons of cornflour.  The pastry is a mini batch of my usual pie crust, I just halved the quantities. Being sick is THE WORST but fresh summer stone fruit and pastry seems like a good antidote, or at least a nice distraction.  A quick and easy entry back into my fifty pies project, and not a bad start to 2017 - the year of the pie!

[fiftypiestreet]

This might be one of my last pies for a little while.  I’ve got one to make for a party next week and I’ve promised my family one for Christmas (my dad and grandmother actually fought over the last slice of that three berry pie from last week!), but I’ve got an injury that makes standing in the kitchen for hours a week a bit much at the moment, so apart from those two I will be taking a break until next year. Still, this is week eleven and technically pie thirteen, so that’s something!  I’m more than a quarter of the way to fifty pies.  I certainly feel like I’ve more or less mastered the art of the fruit pie in that time, and can now play around with them without relying on recipes too much. I can’t link to the recipe for this peach maple pie because I decided to wing it.  I winged it?  Wung it?? Both the crust and the filling have maple syrup in them, and the filling also has peaches and brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, and a bit of cornflour to thicken it up.  There is a LOT of maple syrup involved, but it doesn’t taste particularly mapley, mostly it just tastes like peaches.  Which is still great, because peaches are fantastic.  I do love summer stone fruit season!

[fiftypiestreet]

This week was another two pie week, not because either pie was a failure but because my life is entirely pie, now, apparently.  Whoops. My dad’s been requesting a pie for a while, so I made pie number one - triple berry pie with a vanilla fancy lattice crust - when I had dinner with him on Thursday.  The second is a piña colada cream pie (with a gingersnap crust) that I made for a boozy night with friends on Friday.  There aren’t many photos of that one because…well.  Something to do with leftover rum. (I think, technically, the piña colada one is a tart, but let’s not quibble over semantics.) Apparently fruit pie is now second nature to me so I didn’t use a recipe for the first one.  I did add a little vanilla extract to the pastry dough (mixed it in with the water at the final blending stage) which made it taste like a sugar cookie!  Definitely going to try that with other flavouring extracts, and maybe honey or maple syrup too, because it was very effective.  The fancy lattice top is fun, but it was such a pain to put together so I don’t know how often I’m going to bother with that sort of thing. The piña colada pie is very loosely based on this recipe but I used less yoghurt (because I misread the ingredients list when I was shopping) and more cream, I omitted the coconut extract because I didn’t have any, and I used this gingersnap tart base because I am Australian and I don’t know what a graham cracker is, and certainly cannot buy a pre-made graham cracker crust in the supermarket!  I also replaced the water with more rum, and added an extra two tablespoons of rum for good measure.  Oh, and the yoghurt I used was dairy free coconut yoghurt, not normal yoghurt with coconut flavour!  That stuff is pretty awesome. The piña colada pie was nice, and the texture was really good (I’m always worried pies and cheesecakes with jelly crystals in them are going to come out too chewy) but the flavour wasn’t especially strong.  More pineapple and coconut required, next time. Also now I have a gigantic bag of shredded coconut I need to make use of somehow.  That stuff does not come in sensible quantities.

[fiftypiestreet]

Here's a Pro Tip (I feel after nine-and-a-half pies I am obviously now qualified to give Pro Tips): when attempting something complicated that you've never tried before, keep it as simple as possible and maybe don't start it at 8pm on a week night.

Oh, and don't try and make pastry on a 30 degree day?  Especially when it's a new recipe that you are making extra tricky by experimenting??  Just an idea.

This week's pie was actually two pies: an absolutely disastrous ambitious-new-recipe pie (sorry, tart) and a thrown-together-in-half-an-hour emergency backup pie, which was actually pretty great.

I started with this sweet tart crust recipe (it has an egg in it!  Thrilling!) and then, because last week's cinnamon crust made me want to Experiment with Flavours (like an idiot), I switched out the sugar for dark brown sugar and added a tablespoon of gingerbread spice mix.  Because why make things easy for myself, right?  This dough is SUPER delicate, and it was too cold when I started rolling it out so it fell apart and I had to roll it out again.  The second time it went into the tin beautifully, and then because I am a FOOL I forgot it was a loose bottomed flan tin and put my hand through the bottom of the crust trying to get it in the oven.  I rolled it out again but by that point it was too warm and soft and it was a disaster, so I put it back in the fridge for a bit.  Then FINALLY on the FOURTH try, I managed to get it rolled out and into the tart tin.  Horribly overworked and probably now with the texture of sawdust.  But…GINGERBREAD sawdust!

It blind baked very nicely and was looking just the way it was supposed to look.  So far, so good, dough crisis averted.  But then…THEN came the lemon filling.

It went together wonderfully at first and was exactly the right amount to fill the tart crust to the brim, but once it went into the oven it started acting…weird.  Perhaps the oven was too hot?  The filling puffed up on one side first, and then went brown in one spot, and continued puffing up all over.  Not the beautiful, smooth, shiny yellow tart surface I was expecting.  Plus I baked it for the thirty five minutes and it was still nowhere NEAR set, so it went in for another ten minutes.  And then another.  And then I realised the edges were starting to caramelise and burn and it still really wasn't right.  I took it out of the oven and left it overnight to see if it would set any further, but investigation in the morning revealed a soggy, burnt, hideous mess.  Not clear whether this was baker error or terrible recipe but whatever happened it was an unmitigated disaster.

The crust tasted pretty good, though?  So I guess that's a win for next time.

I was supposed to be serving this disaster to a friend who was coming over for dinner, so thank goodness I can now throw a pie crust dough together in ten minutes, and thank goodness I had a tin of apple pie filling in the cupboard and a bag of frozen cherries in the freezer.  The apple and cherry pie (1 tin of apple pie filling, 300g frozen cherries, 3 tblsp cornflour and 1/2 cup sugar) with gingerbread pie crust (my usual recipe with a little brown sugar and two teaspoons of the gingerbread spice mix added) wasn't very exciting, but it tasted awesome and had that lovely firm consistency you want from a fruit pie.

Shame about all the lemons, though.

[fiftypiestreet]

Rhubarb is one of those (fruits? vegetables??) uh…things that seems to fill the same space in the world as lemons; you don’t BUY lemons, they just appear in your life when someone’s backyard lemon tree explodes with fruit and they start desperately handing off bags of lemons to anyone who will take them.  This week a family friend experienced an explosion of backyard rhubarb and I reaped the benefits.  When life gives you lemons you make lemonade, and when life gives you rhubarb…?  I don’t know about you, but I made raspberry rhubarb pie with a cinnamon crust. The filling is loosely based on this one, but I only had three cups worth of rhubarb, so I added extra raspberries.  The crust is just my usual food processor pie crust recipe with a tablespoon of cinnamon in it.  My first flavoured pie crust!  I think it works, but might be better with a little sugar added.  Now I’m trying to work out how I could do a gingerbread flavoured crust for Christmas. The more familiar I get with a particular cooking technique like fruit pie filling, the lazier I get with following recipes.  In this case that comfortable slap-dashedness may have worked against me, because as you can see that filling is ridiculously thin.  I tipped at least a cup of syrup out of the pie tin before refrigerating it.  I think next time I need to cook it longer, add a little more cornflour, or pre-cook the binding on the stove before filling the crust like I did with the cherry pie.  But it tastes great, especially with vanilla ice cream. It feels a bit like the world has been pelted with lemons in this past week and it won't stop any time soon.  A little sweetness doesn't erase that, but it was exactly what I needed today.

[fiftypiestreet]

Okay, so.  This might be my first pie flop.

I mean, they're not awful.  But they're not really RIGHT either.

This week's pies are SO MESSY.  I know that bubbled over pie filling is A Look that's not only perfectly acceptable but is actually desirable sometimes, but this feels like overkill.  Ugh they were so neat and cute before I baked them and now there is blueberry juice EVERYWHERE.  The juice sort of exploded in the oven, and ended up seeping down into the cups of the muffin tin and making the pies purple and soggy, as well as dripping into the bottom of the oven and burning on there (aahhhh I HATE cleaning the oven 😩)

I'm not really sure what went wrong, or if indeed anything went wrong.  Maybe this filling is just better in a full size pie.  Maybe blueberry pie works better with frozen blueberries than fresh ones.  Maybe I should have pre-cooked ALL the blueberries on the stove before filling the pies, instead of making the sauce separately and then mixing it through fresh berries.  Maybe the pies were over-filled, or the steam vents should have been bigger.  We just don't know.

They tasted alright, but they were incredibly soggy, which was disappointing because fruit pie is better with a crisp and flaky crust to contrast with the soft and squishy filling.  And they were ugly, which was disappointing because I was taking them to serve at an event and I didn't have time to make anything else!  They all disappeared within a few minutes, though, so I guess they can't have been too unappealing.

[fiftypiestreet]

Monday is Halloween, which isn't really that big a deal in Australia, but it seemed like a good reason to try out that most iconic and yet polarising of American pies: the pumpkin pie.  I also somehow managed to promise pumpkin pies to two sets of people across this weekend, so I made…a lot of them.  Whoops.  Hope people like pumpkin pie.

I'll let you in on a secret that will not be surprising to my Australian readers: I've never eaten pumpkin pie before today, and I find the idea of what is essentially vegetable gingerbread custard a little bit disturbing.  But actually, they taste pretty great!  Definitely like gingerbread custard, with a little pumpkiny quality to them.  And suuuuuper sweet.  But since I have nothing to compare them to, who knows if these little pies would taste remotely familiar to someone who knows what pumpkin pie is supposed to taste like?

There was a bit of an uproar at one time around the discovery that many brands of canned pumpkin contained "squash" as well as or - gasp! - instead of pumpkin.  In Australia, we call "butternut squash" butternut pumpkin anyway, so all bets are off and it's definitely in my pumpkin pies, along with a bit of kent pumpkin for some complexity of flavour (OR so I could buy two half pumpkins and not have to hack into a whole one, YOU DECIDE).

I made my pumpkin puree from scratch not because I'm fancy or holier-than-thou when it comes to baking ingredients, but because I'm Australian and there are, like, two shops that sell canned pumpkin for baking in my entire state.  But if I ever make pumpkin pie again, I'm going the extra mile and getting my pumpkin out of a can.  This homemade pumpkin puree is gorgeous, but oh my goodness is it messy.  I got pumpkin everywhere.  On my face, all over my hands, on my feet?! On the back of one elbow??  How did it even get there?!

You know what else you can't buy in Australia?  Pumpkin Pie Spice.  I mean, the spices are all individually available, but there's nothing on the shelf called "pumpkin pie spice" because pumpkin is a freaking vegetable and we're all much more used to eating it roasted with olive oil or in a fancy salad than sweetened and spiced in a pie or a latte (see also: sweet potato, which should not be eaten with MARSHMALLOWS WHAT THE HELL AMERICA).  It took a bit of work to find a pumpkin pie recipe that wasn't from some Australian supermarket website (seemed inauthentic somehow) but also had more detailed ingredients than "one 16oz can of pumpkin" and "1 tsp pumpkin pie spice", but I managed it in the end.  The recipe is here (with cooking times from here because I made them small)

These were pretty successful except for two things.  One, the dreaded shrinkage gap; in the fourth photo you can see how the completely cooled pie filling has separated away from the crust because the filling and crust shrink in different directions as they cool.  The best way to prevent this probably would have been letting them partially cool in the muffin tin instead of immediately turning them out, but I was in a hurry today.  I'll know for next time.  The second thing was that my usual pie crust recipe didn't stretch far enough so I had to do a few with store-bought shortcrust out of the freezer.  My recipe is much better, and the frozen pastry ones came out a bit tough.  But that's not really a failure, just something to feel smug about 😌

Finally, my friends took me to a hockey game today, which is why that mid-nom photo is at an ice rink!  I was in such a rush I didn't take many photos this weekend, but you get the idea anyway.

Verdict: pumpkin pie!  I'm kind of a fan!

[fiftypiestreet]

I've made one Australian style pie, but so far my recipes have been pretty US dominated (because Americans are obsessed?  With pie??) so when my grandmother foisted a bag of chuck steak upon me on Thursday it seemed like a good opportunity for a nice English pie: beef and ale pie!  Also known as steak and Guinness.  The recipe is here, but let me break it down for you: 

1) Chop a billion things (make someone else dice the onions if, like me, just looking at an onion makes your eyes water), then throw everything into a big pot and simmer for eight million years.  

2) Check on the filling after ten minutes.  Hmm, this is…really liquidy.  It looks more like soup than gravy.  Oh well, those internet recipe writers probably know what they're doing, right?  

2) Check the time.  How is it nine PM??  Why didn't you start this as soon as you got home?!  By this point your house will smell amazing, but don't get excited, you've still got forever to go.  

3) Whatever you do, don't fall asleep.  You don't want to chisel Guinness caramel out of the bottom of your stock pot in the morning, do you?

4) Don't forget to get up every so often and stir, either.  When you do, wonder why it is that all the chairs in your house seem to be as far away from the kitchen as physically possible (or maybe that's just me?).

5) Oh hey, its been simmering for an hour!  Its been a whole hour and yes, it's definitely reduced, but it's also definitely…still soup.  Let it cook a little longer.  You have been checking on this pot of meat and beer since the dawn of time.  You can't feel your feet any more.  BE PATIENT.  THIS IS WHEN THE MAGIC HAPPENS.  

6) Get bored and start making your pastry dough and then stop halfway through because the stupid filling reaches the perfect gravy consistency and you have to get it off the heat RIGHT NOW before you set the kitchen on fire.

7) Curse your life because it's too hot to go in the fridge and you can't go to bed until it's cooled down a bit.  Leave the kitchen in a horrendous mess because you're exhausted.

8) In the morning, feel extremely smug because everything is ready to go AND someone else cleaned the kitchen while you were asleep so you can pretend putting this perfect pie together is absolutely effortless.  You domestic goddess, you.

If you follow all these instructions, you will find yourself the proud owner of a seriously delicious hearty beef pie.  Like OMG, this is good shit.  Flavourful gravy, tender flaky beef pieces, little bits of mushroom and carrot and onion, and THE best iteration of my go-to pie crust recipe so far.  So crisp!  So flaky!  Soooo buttery!  Perfect for today's decidedly English spring weather, too. I think I’m getting the hang of this pie thing.

[fiftypiestreet]

It's been a hell of a week.  What I really wanted to do today was lie face down on the floor and not move for 24 hours, but I'm not sure when anyone last vacuumed and my freezer was full of butter and cherries, so I made pie instead.

In the first photo, you can see my lovely pie assistant!  R has been my BFF since we were four years old, and she has been so excited and encouraging about my crazy pie making schemes that I had to get her on board for at least one pie.  Cherry pie is her favourite, so cherry pie it had to be.

When I hear the word pie I always imagine either an apple pie or a cherry pie with a lattice top.  I blame America for this, because my grandmother's apple pies look nothing like the perfect cartoon apple pie in my head, and until today I had never eaten a cherry pie in my life.  But they are definitely pie archetypes, all the same.  Plus there's that Warrant song, which I will now have stuck in my head for approximately forever.  Damn it.

The filling here is basically the cherry pie from Beth M. Howard's Ms American Pie, reproduced on Leite's Culinaria here.  I say basically because I was both lazy and distracted today, so I tweaked it a little.  I used a kilo of frozen cherries and I let them thaw almost completely, plus there was SO much juice that I drained it off and thickened it over heat on the stove before stirring it back into the cherry mixture.  I also added about a teaspoon of cinnamon, but I don't think you can really taste it in the finished product.  My only concern is that the filling has a bit of a chalky cornflour taste (four tablespoons may be excessive) but it's faint and it still tastes great.  And the filling is nice and thick!  So you can slice it into actual perfect cartoon pie slices!!  This has, frankly, been my dream since day one of my pie making adventures, to make a pie that looks like a drawing of a pie.

No soggy bottom this time, possibly because I baked it hotter and longer, and the frozen butter trick is still giving me a perfect flaky crust (I made the 3-2-1 dough from last week again and it still felt way too wet coming out of the food processor, but still baked perfectly anyway).

Basically, this cherry pie was everything I wanted cherry pie to be.  I feel like I've reached some kind of high point of pie making and it's all downhill from here.  Which is going to make the next forty six weeks pretty miserable, I guess.

[fiftypiestreet]

AW YES.

I was so sure this crust dough was overworked and was going to turn out horrible, but it was PERFECT.  Flaky and buttery and flipping tasty.  Self high five!

I tried a new approach this week, based on the same recipe I used for the apple pie but tweaked to adhere to the "3-2-1 rule of pie crusts" that I keep seeing so many baking blogs talking about; three parts flour, two parts fat and one part ice water.  I weighed the ingredients to make sure the proportions were exactly right and used 255g flour, 170g butter, 85g water (and let me tell you getting exactly 85 grams of water in a cup is…fiddly).  I also froze the butter overnight instead of just chilling it, and I think that made the biggest difference; there were still visible streaks of butter in my dough when I rolled it out, and that's where all the flaky goodness lives!  So there will be cubes of frozen butter living in my freezer from now on.  That’s not weird, right?

The strawberry filling is super simple (although dicing five cups of strawberries left my kitchen looking like a bloodbath), just berries, sugar and cornflour, guided by The Little Epicurean's strawberry pie recipe.  And, let's be honest, when I say “guided by” I mean I mostly just eyeballed the quantities because I'd used up all my capability for precision on that pastry.  It's tart and squishy and delicious.  A whole bunch of juice came out of the berries while I was rolling out the dough for the pie lids, so I'm glad I let it sit before filling the pies.  

Even with less juice in the filling, they all had SOGGY BOTTOMS!  Devastating!  I'd been feeling so smug about my perfectly crisp pie bottoms so far, but I guess none of the previous fillings were as juicy as this one.  It tasted good anyway, but still made me make this face: (▰︶︹︺▰)

How cute is that bunny shape, though?  The tiny bunny cookie cutter came from a kids' playdough set I got for two dollars at the chemist, of all places.  WINNING.  Stay tuned for appearances from the butterfly, flower and BEE cutters from the same set!

[fiftypiestreet]

OBVIOUSLY this week's pie needed to be a meat pie, because it's Grand Final weekend!  I don't know what I was thinking with that strawberry nonsense.  I've never watched an AFL game in my life, but it would be too weird for an Australian on a pie-making quest to not make Australia's most iconic pie at some point, and how could I pass up this perfect opportunity to make the first of many thematic pie choices?

So, alright, meat pie.  Not beef and mushroom pie or steak and kidney pie, just…meat.  Best not to ask the specifics when hoeing into the old Four'n Twenty (there was talk of pig arseholes in the playground when I was a kid), it's just a minced meat pie filling with lots of brown gravy, a shortcrust bottom and a flaky puff pastry lid.  It's best served with a dollop of tomato sauce, and best eaten out of the plastic bag it comes in because you'd better believe that blisteringly hot gravy is going EVERYWHERE.  When they’re little, like these ones, they’re called party pies.  The meat pie is a staple of Australian food culture, along with fairy bread, Christmas Day pav and the humble snag in a bit of bread.  Look, we don't stuff around with all that fancy shit, mate.

Unfortunately, having decided to make my own meat pies, I stumbled upon a bit of a - aha - snag: all the recipes I found online for "Aussie meat pie" seem to be written by Americans, and they frequently involve "ketchup," which is about as Aussie as Donald Trump (ooh, topical!).  There was one with Vegemite in it, but I think the poor cook had just become deranged with excitement over exotic Australian ingredients and threw it in there in a panic.  I tried turning to Donna Hay for guidance, the Australian queen of pristinely styled "easy" home cooking, but her recipe called for A KILO AND A HALF of meat, and I thought my household might kick me out if I made them eat a kilo of pies in one weekend.  So I have, in the end, blended a couple of recipes: Donna's meat pies and this US one from Food.com.  I wasn't planning on turning this into a recipe blog, but for ease of explaining what I changed, my ingredients and measurements were:

500g minced beef 1 diced onion 1 cup of beef stock, plus another half a cup at the end 1 tblsp tomato paste 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce, plus an extra couple of sloshes when I was tasting Cracked black pepper A pinch of nutmeg A few good shakes of the dried oregano jar 2 tablespoons cornflour

I followed the method from the Food.com recipe, but I didn't boil it for 15 minutes because it was drying out (that's when I added the extra stock!) and I baked them at 180 degrees Celcius for about 25 minutes.  They turned out great!  Not as oozy as a proper party pie, but juicy and delicious.

Also, because Donna loves me, she told me to use store-bought puff pastry instead of tearing my hair out trying to make my own, so my pie crust experiments are on hiatus until next week and I can't take the credit for that flaky perfection.  It's not my fault!  Donna said!