Gingerbread Cheesecake

December 22, 2019

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.

Candy Cane Pie

December 9, 2019

Annie was slated for pie the Sunday after Thanksgiving, but there was still a good amount of leftover pie, so we decided to shift her back a week. That made it December, which means Christmas, which means candy canes.

It looked even better as a whole pie, but we forgot to take a picture till it had been sliced.

Candy Cane Pie is a wintery festive concoction based principally on cream cheese, instant pudding mix, and gelatin. Chocolate chips, crushed candy canes and a bit of peppermint extract give it a Christmassy chocolate-mint flavor. It’s topped with a layer of white chocolate ganache, semisweet chocolate drizzle, and snowflake sprinkles (and more crushed candy canes). Standard Oreo crust.

The flavor of the pie was wonderful. Cool, creamy, minty, and chocolatey. The consistency was a little less wonderful. It was a bit goopy and clumpy in some spots, and a bit runny in others. When you cut a slice out of the main pie, the side of the slice that you left behind started leaking juices (tasty juices, but a little less than appetizing-looking). The white chocolate ganache layer probably could have used a bit more cream to make it softer, because it was hard to cut through, both to slice the pie and to eat it. But what a way to kick off Christmastime!

Cereal Killer Pie

November 24, 2019

Apparently Leah has decided that she has to do weird pies. We made a lot of suggestions of traditional or only moderately unusual pies, but she wasn’t having any of it. Till she found a suggestion for Cereal Killer Pie. Perhaps it’s a “killer pie” made with cereal? Leah was all in.

The pie is cream cheese and sour cream based, with Fruity Pebbles mixed in. Frosted Flakes are sprinkled on top for some crunch. And the crust is made of Nilla Wafers. That’s five weeks in a row we’ve had a new crust that we haven’t tried before (cinnamon rolls, waffles, butter flavored shortening, chocolate pie, and now Nilla wafers).

Everyone agreed that the crust was actually the best part. It was a very smooth consistency for a crumb crust, and the flavor wasn’t strong but it was pleasant. The filling was quite tangy with all the cream cheese and sour cream, and that meant that it wasn’t everyone’s favorite. The Fruity Pebbles (and the marshmallows – Leah thought she would pull a fast one on us and get a box of Marshmallow Fruity Pebbles) got a little soggy and limp inside the filling, but they looked great and they did a great job of imparting their fruity flavor to the whole thing. The Frosted Flakes were crunchy and nice – we could have used a few more of them. Definitely points for weirdness.

Now we move into Thanksgiving week. The plan is that each of the six family members gets to pick one pie. It can be, but doesn’t have to be, a repeat of a pie we’ve done before. But will six pies be enough?

Costco Pumpkin Pie

November 17, 2017

It’s autumn. We haven’t made a pumpkin pie (the sweet potato pie of last week doesn’t count). Costco’s pumpkin pie is out. Costco charges $5.99 for a giant pumpkin pie. Costco’s pumpkin pie is better than anyone’s homemade pie. So when Matt was at Costco this week for other purposes, he picked up a pie. That’s all the explanation necessary.

Ellie spent the next week eating pumpkin pie for breakfast every day. Because that’s the way she rolls.

Sweet Potato Pie

November 10, 2019

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.)

Apple Pumpkin Cinnamon Roll Streusel Pie

October 27, 2019

As we have established, Ellie loves cinnamon and other fall-centric flavors. She was thinking of some normal or perhaps Halloween-themed pie, but when we were invited to some friends’ house for a pie party, she wanted to go epic. So she searched for and found a recipe for apple-pumpkin pie. Then she paired that with a cinnamon roll crust (normal pie dough spread with a cinnamon-sugar mixture, rolled, sliced, and formed into a crust). Here’s the result of just the crust.

The filling was a pretty standard apple pie filling (only two apples, though) with pumpkin filling poured over the top of it. Then the top was a streusel layer that gave it some crunch.

This was taken at the end of the pie party. Note the fairly whole pie that someone else brought, in the background.

The result was a really popular, great tasting fall pie. It was definitely much more of a pumpkin pie than it was an apple pie. The apples kind of got lost in the pumpkin, and the suspicion among the eaters was that pumpkin is boss of apple, so side-by-side, pumpkin wins. The cinnamon roll crust was surprisingly tasty, providing an unexpected kick of cinnamony sweetness every now and then, but it was also surprisingly undercooked. We cooked the pie (tented and covered) for about a half hour longer than our recipe called for, because the pumpkin filling was still jiggly. The consistency of the pumpkin turned out great, but perhaps there was just a bit too much liquid in the pie to really cook the crust. Blind-baking before filling would have been a wise choice.

Maple Walnut Cheesecake

September 29, 2019

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.

Honey Lavender Pie

July 21, 2019

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!

Donut Pie

July 21, 2019

Leah originally had a tough time deciding what kind of pie to make this week. Matt was trying to push her toward a raspberry pie, and the others were pushing for chocolate. But then we remembered that this was the week we were having our friends the Clarks over for the weekend, and they (one of them in particular) are a little obsessed with donuts. So Leah chose Donut Pie.

The concept is pretty simple: Regular pie crust (we’ve kind of been honing in on a recipe with both butter and shortening in it) with a pile of glazed donut holes, with a bit of a buttery mixture baked around it, covered in glaze. Because this was Leah’s pie, the glaze had to be blue. With sprinkles.

There was a hint of cinnamon in the mixture, but mostly it tasted like a bunch of donut holes. Not a bad thing to put in your mouth. Not bad at all.

Lucky Charms Pie

April 28, 2019

Leah went crazy this week and decided to make a Lucky Charms pie. Yes, there is such a thing as Lucky Charms pie. The crust is made from crushed up cereal pieces. The filling is cream cheese and marshmallows, divided into rainbow stripes. Then all the marshmallows in the cereal box on top. There’s an entire box of Lucky Charms in this pie, plus a bunch more stuff!

The pie was surprisingly tasty. The kids enjoyed eating off all of the marshmallows (when they left the room, there was still some pie left on the serving dish, but there were no marshmallows on top of it). The filling was better than expected, and the colors matched the marshmallow colors just right. We all gave it a thumbs up.