For quite a long time now, Matt has known that he wanted to make the Martha Stewart Gingerbread Cheesecake for his last pie of the year. It’s festive, fun, decadent, and gives us an excuse to make gingerbread cookies!
The fact that we got to decorate it was just icing on the pie!
The crust is made of crumbled up gingerbread cookies. Because Martha Stewart’s recipe didn’t get the best reviews, Matt found an alternative recipe online and made that. The cookies were soft and spicy and delicious. Martha recommends just baking a boring old rectangle of dough, since you’re just going to crumble it up anyway, but where’s the fun in that? Matt and the girls had fun making Christmas stegosauruses, Christmas pumpkins, Christmas cars, and so forth with our varied cookie cutters. Then we crushed them and pressed them into the pan. The filling was a basic cheesecake with molasses (one of Matt’s favorite flavors and one of Shelly’s least favorite) and ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
It didn’t set up quite as well as it could have, but nonetheless the desired effect was achieved. Christmas cheesecake. Shelly even said, “I don’t like gingerbread, but I like this.” That’s about the highest compliment it could get.
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.
I (Matt) had a hard time choosing a pie this week. The year is running out, and there are still several pies I’d like to choose. But I reached out to my ally, Ellie, and made a pact. If she will make another pie I wanted for Thanksgiving, I’ll make this pie that should make her happy now. So sweet potato pie it is.
I’ve never tried a sweet potato pie, but have always been intrigued by it. I like sweet potatoes. They say it’s a lot like pumpkin pie and I like pumpkin pie. But without the Pie Project behind me, there’s always something that I’d rather choose. I think I just grabbed the recipe from Allrecipes.com, and turns out it’s exactly like pumpkin pie, except you’ve swapped out one mooshy orange vegetable for another.
Just look at that firm filling and that flaky crust
I’ve got to say, I think my execution on this pie was as good as it’s ever been this year. I used the shortening/butter crust recipe we’ve been using a lot this year, but switched the shortening to butter-flavored shortening. The crust was out of this world. flaky, flavorful, and thick. If nothing else comes out of the Pie Project, we’ve learned to make good crust. And the filling turned out perfectly – it was just the right firm consistency, not a bit over- or under-baked.
It tasted like a fantastic pumpkin pie. If you really strained and paid close attention, you could taste a bit of potatoey flavor. But it mostly tasted like “pumpkin spice” (that is, cinnamon and nutmeg). We even gave some to unsuspecting guests, who said “This is great pumpkin pie.” They were none the wiser. I’m not sure there’s a reason to choose sweet potato pie over pumpkin pie or vice-versa. They’re interchangeable. (Unless the great texture was the fault of the potatoes.)
As we established a couple of weeks ago with Annie’s Thin Mint Brownie Cheesecake, cheesecake is a kind of pie. It has a crust, a filling, and it’s served in wedges. Cheesecake is just a kind of custard, really, and we’ve had a lot of custard pies this year.
To celebrate the arrival of fall, it’s time to go maple (despite the fact that maple syrup is collected in the springtime). So Matt went with a Maple Walnut Cheesecake. It’s a pretty straightforward cheesecake: lots of cream cheese and eggs in a graham cracker crust, just with a bit of maple syrup thrown in. We added a tiny bit of maple extract as well, and while we were a little afraid that would over-maple it, it actually turned out with a rather light maple flavor. Without it, it might not have been very mapley at all. On top, there are candied walnuts – covered in maple syrup/corn starch. Ellie threw in some cinnamon on some of them because Matt let her.
We probably should have tented the pie with foil and left it in the oven quite a bit longer. The top was getting well done, but the middle was pretty goopy and undercooked. With all those eggs, it probably isn’t a good idea to eat the point part of each slice. But the part that was cooked was smooth and delicate and luscious. The hint of maple and the very sweet and crunchy walnuts (this is the second pie in a row with nuts, after a whole year without any!) were great and perfect for a sort of chilly fall evening.
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.
This was a bonus pie, pushed for by Matt and Ellie, since our friends the Clarks were in town. Where the Donut Pie appealed to everyone’s sweetest, basest dessert instincts, the Honey Lavender Pie was a bit more highbrow.
The previous weekend we had journeyed to Sequim, Washington – the self-proclaimed Lavender Capital of North America. While our main purpose there was to meet the waving bears (which we did, and it was awesome), we also stopped at a lavender farm selling you-pick lavender for $5 a bunch. We collected about as much as we thought we would need for a pie, but when we brought it to the counter to pay, they said that wasn’t nearly a “bunch,” so we could either go pick more or have that much for free. “I prefer free,” Matt said cautiously. And so it was.
The pie had a lot of honey and a lot of eggs, making it very sweet, and giving it a flan-like texture. The lavender is steeped in cream until it absorbs the essence of the flowers. The result is a flavor that is very strong in both honey and lavender. Our friends, upon eating it, said, “I’m burping up lavender.” And, “What if you took a bubble bath and ate a slice of this pie in the bubble bath? It would be the full lavender experience: lavender within, lavender without!” Ellie said she couldn’t taste the lavender, but the rest of us felt it was overpowering. Shelly and the girls didn’t particularly care for it, but others liked it, and no one hated it. The pie was definitely better the next day after it had thoroughly chilled. A fantastic, unusual summertime pie that we wouldn’t have tried if it weren’t for the Pie Project!
We were driving home from Utah for Matt’s week, but fortunately, he snagged some cherries from his dad’s cherry tree and brought them home. There weren’t quite enough, though, so we bought some more from the store, and Matt made it during the week.
The biggest accomplishment here was that we finally got our first lattice-top pie of the year. Shelly said, “Boy, those lattice strips are pretty wide.” Matt responded, “Well, this was my first try – I wanted to have fewer strips!” It turned out lovely.
Of course, no one ate it. Our family is made up of weirdos who refuse to even try yummy fruit pies. Ellie had a small piece, but the rest of the job was left to Matt.
Frankly, it could have been better. The recipe we used called for vanilla and almond extract, and next time we should omit that. The extracts gave it a kind of artificial taste. Though there wasn’t any chocolate in this pie, it reminded Matt of a cherry chocolate, with cherries and that liqueur goop around it that tastes a little funny, except not as sugary. And it was really watery and runny – we had to drain the pie before slicing, and even then there was a lot of liquid. Perhaps more cornstarch or less juicy cherries. But the crust was fabulous and it was still pretty darn good.
Because we went over to some friends’ house for dinner, we needed two pies to fill everyone up. We found out what our host’s favorite pie was and made that – apple pie. So we broke what Shelly thinks is a rule: no pie repeats during the year. After all, how can you spend an entire year and only eat one apple pie? Apple pie is the best pie. For all the research of different creative and crazy pies we’ve done this year, it’s clear that there is a very good reason apple pie is so darn popular.
Matt wanted to try a lattice, but the dough we use for this pie is so soft, it doesn’t work well for that kind of thing. So he just wrote “PIE” on the pie. Because it’s pie.
Let the record show that Matt voluntarily picked a chocolatey pie. But let the record also show that there were exigent circumstances. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the family was in Utah for a wedding. Staying at Matt’s parents’ house and focusing on visiting family, there wasn’t a lot of time or materials to make an epic creation like the Cannoli Pie of six weeks ago. It had to be something simple and easy.
Because it was Memorial Day, that meant two things: it was the beginning of summer, and it was a time to remember loved ones who have passed on. We’ve been saving some intriguing pie recipes for the summer, but the obvious category of summertime pie is ice cream pie. Plus, ice cream pie is super simple and easy. And Matt’s mom, who passed away a few years ago, was a big fan of chocolate marshmallow ice cream. You never see it around much anymore, but it’s basically just chocolate ice cream with a marshmallow ripple. So off to Wal-Mart we went, where we got a pre-made Oreo crust, Tillamook chocolate ice cream (for an amazing price – thanks, Utah!), and marshmallow fluff. Mix, scoop, presto: chocolate marshmallow ice cream pie. After eating it, we visited the cemetery with the family and paid homage to the inspiration behind the pie. Miss you, Mom!
The Pie Project 