After Christmas, we fell into a very relaxed state of life and we almost forgot about the fact that we needed one more pie on Sunday! Kate wasted no time in stating that she wanted a chocolate lava pie, with a gooey chocolate middle. So we found one.
Behold, the final pie of the Pie Project!
The task of making the pie fell to Shelly and Matt (though Kate helped a little). Matt made the basic standard butter-and-butter-flavored-shortening crust we’ve decided is our new go-to. Shelly did the filling, which was basically melted chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar, and a bit of flour and salt (which added a nice kick). We ate it while it was still warm from the oven, with some absolutely necessary vanilla ice cream. Kate, the stinker, didn’t finish her piece, but the rest of us agreed it was great. It reminded us a lot of Kate’s Chocolate Fudge Pie from earlier this year, but this was definitely lava-ier. The leftovers might last us till 2020.
The middle was basically chocolate goop, and could not be eaten without vanilla ice cream.
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.
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.
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!
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.
It’s not that Kate isn’t creative – it’s just that she knows what she likes. Another iteration of chocolate fudge, this week it was Brownie Pie. This pie featured a chocolate pie dough that we got from a neighbor some time ago, but haven’t ever used in the Pie Project. It’s got most of the main ingredients of pie dough plus chocolate, and it comes out kind of like a solid chocolate cookie. It’s great.
You can see the shine of the goopy middle.
Inside this great shell was something that was more akin to warm half-baked brownie batter than it was an actual brownie. That is to say, it was incredible. We made 1.5x the filling of this recipe (to fit our large pie pan), which meant we baked it a little longer, and we left out the walnuts. We served it warm, and it was goopy and smooth and fudgy and all of us were reaching for the vanilla ice cream and milk. One does not simply eat a slice of Kate’s Brownie Pie without a glass of milk handy. It was very similar to the Chocolate Fudge Pie she made in the spring, but that was one of the universally acknowledged best pies of the year, so apparently this one was too.
It’s Halloween time, so Annie’s variation on her constant chocolate theme was a ghosts-in-the-graveyard pie. She made it up herself. It had an Oreo crust, a filling made of chocolate pudding mixed with whipped cream, and then more crushed Oreos on top (to look like the dirt of a graveyard) and marshmallows on toothpicks to represent ghosts. They might or might not have looked more like snowmen than ghosts, but the effect was there.
Ooh, spooky!
With all those Oreos, it couldn’t possibly be bad, right? Annie believes that it was one of her best pies this year, even if it was one of the simplest. She also thinks that the so-called snowmen look like ghosts and they were the best she could do. Mom wouldn’t let her use the big marshmallows.
A Mississippi Mud Pie is a traditional Southern pie with a creamy chocolate filling on a chocolate crust, topped with whipped cream and pecans. Shelly probably would totally choose that, but she found a recipe for something even more Shelly-like: a “Texas Flood Pie.” This one featured peanut butter as well as chocolate. Surprisingly, Shelly (who often doesn’t care for nuts) left the pecans in, though she left half of the pie pecan-less for the kids. Marshmallows too.
But the special aspect of this pie was the crust. It was made from Ritz crackers. We’ve done saltines before in Atlantic Beach Pie, but Shelly has been excited for a Ritz crust for some time, due to their butteriness and saltiness. The recipe called for a little extra salt thrown into the crust, though, and we all kind of agreed that’s a little too much. The salt in the crackers would have been plenty. The rest of the pie was nutty and chocolatey and smooth – especially the layer of chocolate ganache at the bottom of the pie.
It’s kind of amazing it’s taken Annie this long to choose a chocolate mint ice cream pie. It’s a variation on her theme of chocolate at all costs, she loves mint chip ice cream, and summer is now over so ice cream pies are on the way out. We used Tillamook mint chip ice cream, which is the best – they actually make it taste better by refusing to dye it some unnatural green color. Oreo crust, hot fudge layer on top of the ice cream, whipped cream on top of that, and chopped mint chips (appropriately green) to make it look awesome. Everyone wished their piece was a little bigger.
Again, due to lots of guests, we got a second pie (at this rate, we’re going to finish the year with a lot more than 52 pies – we’re actually almost there!). Leah and Shelly kind of collaborated on the choice for this one: a different kind of S’mores pie than the one Shelly made a few weeks ago.
Note the marshmallow ooze.
The crust was more of a graham-infused pie crust than it was a traditional graham-cracker crust. There’s other stuff in there: flour, egg, butter, sugar, vanilla. Then you add marshmallow creme and chocolate, and then a top crust. A weird thing happened that didn’t seem like it should have, based on the online recipe: during baking, the marshmallow creme seeped up through the top crust, turning it into a soft, marshmallowy gooiness. “Gooey” is the best word for this pie. When you cut a slice and lift it out of the pan, long, sticky strings of marshmallow resist your efforts, trying to keep the slice at home. The three main flavors (graham, marshmallow, and chocolate) really meld together. It was a hit.
The Pie Project 