Arizona Sunshine Pie

April 7, 2019

The second pie of General Conference weekend was picked to celebrate the visit of Grandma and Grandpa from sunny Arizona! Shelly had been wanting to try a lemon pie and when she found a lemon pie called Arizona Sunshine pie, she had to try it!

Tastewise, this pie was a real disappointment to Shelly. It had a bitterness to it that she didn’t like. We assume this came from the fact that you put a whole lemon (except the seeds) into a blender to make the filling, so the rind is a part of the curd as well. After suffering through the first piece, Shelly was done with it. Other fruit pie lovers, liked the pie and declared it great. (Ellie “loved” it).

If doing again, we would use the juice and zest of two lemons instead of the whole lemon to make the filling. In fact, Shelly feels she needs to have a do-over because she wanted to love this pie, and was so sad when it failed. Will Arizona Sunshine redeem itself? We’ll have to wait and see…

Peanut Butter Pie

April 7, 2019

This week was General Conference, so we headed over to our cousin’s house to watch the last session and eat dinner. Plus, Shelly’s parents are visiting for spring break as well. Given the amount of people, we knew one pie would not be enough. So Shelly made two!!!

The first was a creamy peanut butter pie. Shelly added a twist by using Do Si Do Girl Scout cookies to make the crust, while the original recipe called for a traditional pie crust. The peanut butter cookie crust really added that extra zing. This pie was enjoyed by everyone.

To make the Do Si Do pie crust, Shelly put one box full of cookies in the blender, until it was sand consistency. Then she added 5 tablespoons of melted butter, 1/4 cup of sugar (actually a little less), 1/8 tsp of salt and mixed it all up and spread it in the pie pan. Then she baked the crust at 350 for about 10 minutes.

Cinnamon Pie

March 31, 2019

Our cinnamon lover, Ellie, was excited a few weeks ago to find a recipe for Cinnamon Pie. It’s been in the works for some time, and today she made the pie all by herself (with some help on the crust from Mom). It was a kind of cream cheese custard pie, with cinnamon and nutmeg. The result looked like a brown pumpkin pie, and it tasted like a spice cake. Annie ventured a bite and declared it “too spicy,” but the rest of the family liked it. We talked a lot about what it reminded us of: pumpkin pie, cream cheese-based pies, and cinnamon rolls. The butter crust we used was a good compliment to the pie – Ellie may have put a little too much salt into the crust, but we couldn’t decide if that made it better or worse. Now that Ellie has made three pies, her official opinion is that nothing is better than apple pie (except maybe key lime pie), and as between oatmeal pie and cinnamon pie (do you notice a trend here?), she says, “Neither. They’re both really good.”

Brookie Pie

March 24, 2019

This week Annie was up again. She decided to combine two things she loves – cookies and brownies! – to make a brookie pie. It’s a chocolate chip cookie crust with a brownie filling. The brownie portion of this pie tasted similar to Kate’s chocolate fudge pie – which means it was really yummy! The challenge with brookies is that cookie batter bakes faster than brownie batter, so the cookie crust was a bit overdone. But it was delicious nonetheless, especially with ice cream and hot fudge. Score for Annie!

Notes: If making this one again, we would consider baking the pie at 325 for a little longer and covering it with foil about 30 minutes in, to see if that would make the cookie crust less overbaked.

Oreo Cream Pie

March 17, 2019

Leah, who has traditionally sided a little more with the fruit-pie-lovers in our family than the chocolate-pie-lovers, broke ranks this week and made an Oreo Cream Pie. 36 Oreos were used in the crust, along with 12 more for the filling (also cream cheese and heavy cream). It was just the right cookie-to-cream ratio, and very fluffy. This is one the whole family really enjoyed.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Caramel Mousse Pie

February 24, 2019

For her second pick, Shelly wanted to try a twist on her favorite kind of pie (chocolate peanut butter pie). So she found a recipe that added caramel to the party. We served the chocolate peanut butter caramel mousse pie along with cake for Shelly’s birthday week celebration. This pie was almost a disaster because the peanut butter whipped topping kind of turned into a curdlely mess. We ended up using it anyway as it tasted good, the texture was just off. All in all, it was a very rich and tasty pie, and was dubbed as “Snickers in pie form” by our friend, Bryan.

Notes: We found that it was better the day after it was made (having had time to chill). If making again, we would make it early the day before. We would also not bake the oreo crust, as the recipe suggests (too hard). To avoid the PB whipped topping disaster, we would consider trying peanut butter powder, instead of peanut butter. Finally, we also added mini chocolate chips to the PB whipped topping layer and then topped it with layer of whipped cream.

Chocolate Pudding Explosion Pie

February 10, 2019

Annie loves chocolate. She has had a hard time with the Pie Project when it comes to non-chocolate pies. So she took the opportunity to make up a recipe herself: homemade Oreo crust, chocolate pudding. Bam: pie! No whipped cream, even, for Annie. Just chocolate. The girl knows what she likes.

Notes: The Oreo crust consisted of butter and crushed-up Oreos. She used instant pudding from a box.

Chocolate Fudge Pie

January 27, 2019

Kate was up this week. In preparation for this week, Shelly started asking Kate what kind of pie she wanted to make. She kept saying chocolate, but Shelly kept pestering her to specify what kind of chocolate pie she wanted. She finally announced that she wanted to make a “chocolate fudge pie.” Shelly said “I don’t have a recipe for chocolate fudge pie.” Kate rolled her eyes and said, “Look on your phone, Mom.” So Shelly googled those exact words on her phone and showed Kate all of the pictures of chocolate fudge pies that came up in the search. Kate picked her favorite looking one and that’s the one we made.

This pie is easily the best new pie we’ve had so far (writing this in March). Everyone loved it. It tastes like a lava cake in pie form – super rich, moist and very yummy. We served it warm with vanilla bean ice cream. Perfection!

Notes: We didn’t have enough shortening to make our regular pie crust, so we used this butter-based pie crust instead. It was really yummy.

Chocolate gooey deliciousness. Unicorn horn is just an added bonus.

Atlantic Beach Lime Pie

January 20, 2019

One of our favorite new pies that we tried out in November 2018 was the Atlantic Beach Pie, on the recommendation of Matt’s brother. It’s basically a lemon curd pie (based on sweetened condensed milk), but the real kicker is the saltine-cracker crust. The sweet and salty combination was awesome. So for Matt’s first pie of 2019, he chose to do it again, but this time with lime instead of lemon. After all, it’s very close to a traditional key lime pie. It turned out fantastic, but honestly, it’s better in lemon.

Hot Chocolate Pie

January 13, 2019

Week 2 belonged to Shelly. She picked a Hot Chocolate Pie, which Matt thought was really a misnomer, because it was cold. It got the name from the fact that it included chocolate and a marshmallow cream topping. Everyone enjoyed this one.

Notes: If making this pie again, we would chill the pie after adding the marshmallow whipped topping. The marshmallow cream didn’t hold its shape as well as we would have liked. We also skipped the crushed candy canes, because it wasn’t Christmas anymore.