The year is littered with the bodies of the lemon pies Shelly tried, in search of the perfect lemon pie. Arizona Sunshine Pie. Triple Lemon Pie. Atlantic Beach Pie. The Arizona Sunshine Pie turned out to be one of the few failures of the year, and the Triple Lemon was nothing to write home about. Although the Atlantic Beach Pie was universally beloved, she still didn’t feel like we had THE lemon pie. She kept searching, saying that what she really wanted was a lemon bar in pie form (she could have literally just made a lemon bar in pie form – the shortbread crust would have been awesome). Then she found it: the Lemon Curd Pie.
That’s a cheerful pie!
There wasn’t anything particularly special about the crust (we used the crust recipe from the pie recipe), but the filling got it just the way she was looking for. Tart, tangy, light, smooth, and full of lemon flavor. To some people it was a little too lemony. But it’s exactly what Shelly wanted. She said it was like taking a taste of sunshine, and she was talking about how much she loved it for days afterwards. Mark this one down as the definitive lemon pie (non-custard variety; Atlantic Beach wins for best lemon custard pie).
We had so much success at Thanksgiving with the Cranberry Gingersnap Pie and the Apple Pie that Ellie decided for her final pie of the year to just combine the two. We found a recipe for Dutch (meaning: crumb topping) Cranberry Apple Pie, which was basically a bunch of apples and fresh cranberries, spices, and butter in a pie crust.
Cranberries are the world’s most beautiful fruit.
But the key ingredient, which seemed a little odd at first, was orange zest. At first, we wondered if it really needed to be included – after all, this was an apple/cranberry pie, not an orange pie. But it turned out the orange zest made the pie. With the warm spices and various fruit flavors – including the citrusy tang of the orange zest – what this became was wassail in pie form. It was Christmassy and comforting and zesty. Served warm with a little whipped cream, there’s nothing better on a cold winter night.
And of course Ellie went all-out with the sugared cranberries, orange slice, and cedar sprig from our yard.
This whole Pie Project really had its genesis last Thanksgiving. We made a bunch of pies throughout the month of November 2018 and that led to the decision that we needed to own more pie plates, and that led to the Pie Project as a way to put them to good use. A year later, after establishing pie as our be-all-end-all for the year, we knew we had to do something epic for Thanksgiving. We decided the way to go would be to have six pies, bringing our total for the year up to 66 pies. Each family member could choose one pie. It could be a repeat of a pie we’ve already had this year, or it could be a new one. As it turned out, we had two repeats and four new ones. In no particular order:
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough “Ice Cream” Pie
Even lovelier than the one from June
Leah’s choice was the re-creation of the pie which prompted a friend to say “This is the best pie I’ve ever had in my life!” There is no actual ice cream in this pie, but it’s a frozen mixture of cream cheese, Cool Whip, cookie dough balls, and chocolate chips in an Oreo crust. It was one of the more popular pies of Thanksgiving, especially among the younger set.
Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie
There is light-colored peanut butter hiding under that lovely chocolate ganache, promise.
Annie’s choice was the traditional chocolate peanut butter pie we have had every Thanksgiving for many years, but hadn’t included in the Pie Project till now. It’s essentially a buckeye candy in pie form: a powdered sugar/butter/peanut butter mixture for the filling, a chocolate ganache topping, and an Oreo crust. This was the first pie to be all gone – the kids went crazy on it on Black Friday afternoon.
Apple Pie
The prettiest pie of the year? Yup.
Someone had to make sure that there was an apple pie at Thanksgiving, so Ellie and Matt kind of combined forces. Technically, this was Matt’s choice, but Ellie accepted his suggestion for her choice. This is the traditional apple pie we’ve been making for a few years now, but with a new crust that we’ve discovered during the Pie Project, made with both butter and butter-flavored shortening. In order to make it special, Matt made the top a couple of days in advance and spent quite a long time on it. It’s hard to braid pie dough, but check that out. Breakfast the next day was awesome.
Cranberry Gingersnap Pie
The sprig of green came straight from our backyard. The sugared cranberries look great too.
What’s Thanksgiving without cranberries? But no one likes the cranberry sauce that keeps the shape of the can. This pie, suggested by Matt but technically chosen by Ellie, was the talk of Thanksgiving. We all expected it to be good (well, those of us willing to eat non-chocolate pies), but it exceeded all of our expectations. The filling is a cranberry curd made by boiling down fresh cranberries with water and sugar, and then mixing with egg yolks and lemon juice. The filling was tart and sweet and smooth and an incredible color. The crust was made from crushed gingersnap cookies (specifically Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger cookies) and a bit of walnuts. It was sharp and spicy and just the perfect compliment to the filling. Never before has a pie had such strong and distinctive flavors competing between the filling and the crust. I’m not sure we can ever have Thanksgiving without this pie again.
Chocolate Ganache Pie
This pie, chosen by Kate, has been a favorite of the family for Thanksgiving for some time. The filling is two different kinds of chocolate, heavy cream, and eggs. The crust is a chocolate pie crust (basically regular pie crust but with cocoa). Then it’s all topped off by whipped cream and chocolate shavings. It is heavy and rich and you can’t eat a very big slice – or even a very big bite – without gasping for milk. It’s a chocolate lover’s dream.
Atlantic Beach Pie
It looks like the crust reaches higher than the filling, but that’s just more room for whipped cream.
Finally, Shelly chose an Atlantic Beach Pie, which was one of the pies we chose for Thanksgiving last year that inspired us to look for more unusual pies, and led to the pie project. One of the first Pie Project pies in January was a lime version, but the traditional lemon version is better. It’s just about the perfect lemon pie. The filling is essentially the same as a key lime pie, except lemon: lemon juice, sweetened condensed milk, and egg yolks. The crust is saltine crackers, sugar, and butter. We crushed too many crackers and were eating the sweet, buttery, crunchy mixture for a couple of days afterwards. The salty crust is the perfect complement to the sweet, velvety, lemony filling.
Black Friday Pie Party
As has been our tradition for several years now, we once again hosted a Black Friday Pie Party: Bring your leftover pie to share. We had a good crowd show up this year, and we got a lot of good pie out of it. Some of the memorable pies to make an appearance (which don’t count toward the Pie Project because they were made by other families): berry pie, chocolate cheesecake, pecan pumpkin pie, and Costco pumpkin pie (which somehow we ended up keeping nearly the whole pie), sour cream cheesecake, and many more. It was a tasty evening of awesomeness.
Now that it’s September, that means that Ellie’s cinnamon/pumpkin/maple obsession can have free rein. She had a hard time deciding which of many autumn-themed pies she could choose from, but ended up with a choice that made it the first pie of the year to feature meat: the Cinna-Bacon Apple Pie.
We found this recipe months ago as a video clip on the Good Morning America website – a lady came on and made it on the air. But by the time we got around to making it, the content had been removed and we had to rely on someone else’s copycat website where they only listed the ingredients, without any instructions. It turned out pretty well, despite it all.
The crust had bits of bacon it it:
On top of that, there was a layer of apples – we used Garanny Smith and a new breed called Autumn Glory, which is supposed to taste like cinnamon. Bacon bits mixed in. Then a layer of pie dough rolled up with cinnamon-sugar mxture and more bacon bits, to form a sort of cinnamon roll on top. then glaze and more bacon.
It was a bit runny, but tasty!
There was a lot of pie dough in the crust and the cinnamon rolls, and the glaze made it pretty sweet. The bacon was salty and crunchy and was a nice contrast. Those who are willing to eat fruit pies really loved this one.
Late August is blackberry season in Washington. Blackberries are the most pernicious weed in the area, taking over just about any untended patch of earth with their crawling vines and their evil, evil thorns. The best way to strike fear into the heart of a Northwest homeowner is to look at their yard and mention that you see some blackberries coming in. They require a lot of work and a lot of pain to contain (you can never defeat them). Blackberries are an evolutionary mystery: they developed these savage thorns which essentially tell any other living thing to stay as far away as possible, yet they also developed delicious berries that tell other living things to please approach and carry the seeds away.
The good news is that once Matt decided that this would be the week of the blackberry pie, it meant it would be the cheapest pie of the year. Blackberries are free. They are everywhere. Just park your car on the side of just about any road in our neighborhood and you can fill up a bucket with a pie’s worth of blackberries. The bad news is that you have to pay for them in blood. Matt and Shelly chose a thick patch of blackberries on the side of our church parking lot and got more than enough for a pie in 20 minutes of picking. But it was 20 minutes of both of us screaming, “Ow!” and “Just a little closer…” and “Augghh!” Pro tip: when going blackberry picking, wear long pants, gloves, and bring a stick to move the vines around.
They look so gentle and docile when they’re baked into a pie.
The pie? Oh, the pie was fantastic. We used a recipe that called for sour cream, which made it creamier, and Matt tried out a weird decorative lattice, but the blackberries, bless their sadistic little souls, are the stars of the show.
I have been looking forward to late summer to do a tropical pie. I’ve had my eye on a passionfruit chiffon pie recipe, and a strawberry-guava pie recipe. Of course, for my week in late August, I had to pick a blackberry pie because that’s when blackberries are free, but fortunately, we had another family coming over for dinner, so that meant I got to pick two pies. And despite the allure of passionfruit and guava, it was clear that we had to go with pineapple. Our friend John is a normal 12-year-old kid, except that he’s obsessed with pineapples. He wears pineapple print clothes and accessories all the time. His treehouse is called the Pineapple Clubhouse, and it’s decorated accordingly. So of course, we had to make him a pineapple pie.
It really looks good against that tablecloth, doesn’t it?John approved of the pie.
Apparently (according to this online recipe) pineapple pie is popular in Mexico. The filling is pretty simple: cook up some pineapple with cinnamon and cornstarch. The crust was a slightly sweeter version of a traditional pie crust, and I had to decorate it with a food-colored pineapple. The cornstarch in the filling got a little Jell-O-y and lumpy, but overall, the pineapple and cinnamon went very well together. It reminded me of grilled pineapple, which is awesome.
As if having two pies on Sunday wasn’t enough, Ellie was visiting a friend on Monday and they were talking about the pie tradition, so they decided to make a pie together. They called it the “All the Berries” Pie, because it included blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and some cherries for good measure. Not bad for something made up by a couple of kids.
They put so many berries in, not even a top crust could keep it contained.
The cherries seemed a bit odd among the berries, cooked strawberries aren’t the best, and the crust was a little thin. But they got the consistency just right, and the berry slurry mixed together in a wonderful fruity melting pot. Here’s to trying something different!
For Shelly’s week, she tried yet another lemon pie (we’ll find the best lemon pie recipe yet). It’s a lemon pudding-based pie, with full pudding on the bottom layer, pudding plus whipped cream in the middle, and just whipped cream on top. She made the crust out of crushed Savannah Smiles Girl Scout cookies (the lemon ones).
The unusual crust may have been the best part.
The consensus was that this pie really wasn’t lemony enough. The pudding was a little softer than a custard pie would have been. It was good and it was enjoyed by all, but it could have used a richer lemon taste. Maybe some lemon zest next time?
Ellie broke with tradition and made a pie that didn’t have any cinnamon in it. But at least it wasn’t a chocolate pie. We found an Orange Creamsicle Pie recipe online some time ago, but it wasn’t a sure thing that anyone was going to have the guts to pull the trigger on it. Ellie did.
Two layers or orangey goodness.
It’s got two layers on top of the traditional graham cracker crust. First is a creamy cream cheese layer, just like the inside of a creamsicle. And on top is a thinner but stronger layer, powered by orange Jell-O powder. It pretty much nailed the taste of a creamsicle, so if you like that kind of thing (some members of our family don’t, seeing as how there’s no chocolate in a creamsicle), it’s great. It probably would have been even better served frozen, but we didn’t try that.
This week we had Grandpa Astle visiting from Utah, so we had to try two pies. We let Grandpa pick the second one, so this is the first pie that doesn’t come from our immediate family. We went through a few ideas, but since we didn’t have access to any rhubarb (maybe that’s a pie failing this year, but there’s always next year), he decided to make the traditional “cheesecake” that I grew up with. My mom made this pie all the time (usually with a cherry topping), and she just called it “cheesecake.” It is not cheesecake, though: it’s a goopy, sweet mixture of cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk. It wasn’t until I was an adult and had real cheesecake for the first time that I realized what cheesecake really is.
Grandpa and his pie, with toppings in the background.
But although this pie was not cheesecake, it was delicious. We made a blueberry topping for it that complemented the creamy sweetness very well. And it made me remember my mom, which was great too.
Recipe: 8 ounces cream cheese, 15 ounces sweetened condensed milk, 1/3 cup lemon juice. Whip it together, put in a graham cracker crust, chill, and over-eat.
The Pie Project 