Baking Inspiration pt 3: apple pie

Hello blog!

Yes, I did make an apple pie even though I have no prior pie-baking experience. And yes, it does look a bit odd.

Today is Anouk's (my flatmate) birthday and she requested that we make her a pie in honor of her 20th trip around the sun. Obviously, we agreed and I went to the store last night to pick up ingredients. We decided to make the crust from scratch (maybe a mistake), so I needed to get butter, shortening, flour and salt. The instructions for the pie crust called for a food processor as well, which we don’t have, so we ended up just combining everything in a bowl, adding the water and mixing it with forks and our hands. The end product was a bit lumpy, but it looked ok. Next, we shaped it into a disk and put it in the fridge overnight.

This morning, me and Nicky removed the ‘crust’ from the fridge and rolled it out using an empty wine bottle because we also don’t own a rolling pin. Next we placed the ‘crust’ into a loaf pan because we don’t own a pie pan and set that aside. I know it seems like we should have down more research before trying to make this pie, and that is correct. We definitely should have done more research.

Next, we had to make the filling. While I started peeling and slicing the apples, Nicky melted the butter in a saucepan. Once the butter was melted, we added the flour, water, white sugar and brown sugar to the pan and brought it to a boil. After it began boiling, we turned the heat down and let it simmer for awhile (the directions were quite vague about how long it needed to simmer, so we decided 5 minutes was good).

I added the sliced apples into the crust inside the loaf pan and I was sad to find that we had wayyyy more apples than we actually needed. We had 3 more apples than we needed (to be exact) and Nicky and I decided to use the extra ones to make some baked apples. While Nicky started making that, I added the filling to the loaf pan overtop the apples and it seemed to work out pretty well. Next, I flattened out the remaining pie crust and cut it into slices to form the top of the pie. I laid the slices down in a diagonal pattern and popped it in the oven! We let it cook for 15 minutes on 220 degrees C and then cooked it for another 35 minutes on 175 degrees C.

We took it out and it honestly looks pretty good!! It is a little odd around the edges and there is definitely too much butter and we don’t really know if the bottom of the crust cooked, but overall it’s pretty impressive for having no prior pie-baking experience.

I’ll let you know if it tastes any good!

Thanks for reading :)