Thanksgiving 2019: Six Pies

November 28, 2019

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Nutella Pie

October 13, 2019

Leah insisted that she only does “weird pies.” She rejected the idea of something fairly normal, and instead pointed to her successes like the Lucky Charms Pie as her signature style. So this week was Nutella Pie. The crust was a batch of separately cooked brownies, pulled out of the brownie pan and pressed into a springform pan. The filling was Nutella, cream cheese, and heavy whipping cream. In between was a thin layer of melted chocolate chips. When her friend Kennedy, who was at our house for a playdate on Saturday, heard what was going down, she insisted that her family invite us over for dinner on Sunday so she could have some. And so it was.

It was loved by all, though different parts of it were loved differently. Some people loved the hard chocolate layer between the crust and the filling. Others (kids in particular) found that it made it difficult to break a piece off with a plastic fork. The brownie crust was a surprising success, though it was rather soft. The filling was a bit soft as well, though whether that was a feature or a bug was debatable. Some thought that it could have used some stronger hazenut (Nutella) flavor – it was a bit overpowering with the chocolate. Maybe it wasn’t quite as weird as Lucky Charms Pie, but it will go down as a big success.

Halloween Candy Cookie Pie

October 6, 2019

Last week there was this whole controversy over whether or not cheesecake is pie. (That’s silly; of course it is.) This week, however, the question is: If it doesn’t have a crust, can it be pie? Since it’s now October, Kate, who has been planning her Halloween costume for weeks, decided she wanted a Halloween candy pie. She didn’t seem to care that it would be a lot easier to do a Halloween candy pie after Halloween, when we have all the candy. We considered a few possibilities, including just throwing a bunch of candy into a pie shell and baking/melting it all together.

Ultimately, she settled on a Halloween candy cookie pie, which basically consisted of making a bunch of chocolate chip cookie dough and throwing all the candy into it, and then baking it in a pie pan. There was no crust – it was just a big cookie with crazy mix-ins, with some chocolate frosting dollops around the edge. And Kate showed no discrimination in what she threw in. M&Ms are practically normal. Reese’s peanut butter cups make sense. Kit Kats would be fine. But she also put in Skittles, Nerds, and Starbursts. It tasted just like you would expect a large cookie with Reese’s, Nerds, and Skittles to taste. Some of us liked it, others didn’t care for it at all. But it’s not entirely certain that it was pie.

Cinna-Bacon Apple Pie

September 15, 2019

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.

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.

Butterfinger Pie

September 1, 2019

Leah was thisclose to choosing a Nutella pie this week, which everyone was looking forward to. But at the last minute, she swerved and went for a Butterfinger pie. Leah is the queen of choosing a sugary treat that she loves, and adding the word “pie” after it.

That’s what crushed-up Butterfingers look like.

The pie was a pretty basic cream cheese pie, but with some peanut butter to enhance the Butterfinger flavor, and with crushed-up Butterfingers inside and out. We had the missionaries over for dinner and one of them declared “I think this is the best pie I’ve had in my life.” The pie was indeed good – just about everyone agreed it exceeded expectations. But Shelly and Matt chalked up the Elder’s comment to the fact that he hasn’t been around very long and hasn’t tried very many pies.

Pineapple Pie

August 18, 2019

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?

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.

Orange Creamsicle Pie

August 4, 2019

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.

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.

Thin Mint Brownie Cheesecake

July 28, 2019

Leave it to Annie to spark a controversy. For generations, mankind has pondered the question “Is cheesecake pie?” Wars have been fought over the answer. Philosophers have written treatises. Families have been torn apart. Would our family be next?

Of course not. It’s obvious that cheesecake is pie. The fundamental characteristics of pie are: 1) crust, 2) filling, and 3) circular shape. Cheesecake meets all of these criteria easily. Those who espouse the position that cheesecake is not pie (of whom there is at least one vocal advocate in our family, but she’s not writing this blog post) can only point to the word “cake” inside the word “cheesecake,” but just because that word is there doesn’t make cheesecake cake. After all, a starfish is not a fish. Tidal waves have nothing to do with tides. And grape-nuts contain neither grapes nor nuts. It’s a misnomer.

Annie’s Thin Mint Brownie Cheesecake (ignore the additional “cake” in the title at the link) pushed the envelope for sure, however. The “crust” was a layer of brownie on the bottom of a springform pan, and didn’t come up around the sides. But honestly, it’s not entirely clear that it was a cheesecake: the filling was basically cream cheese, cool whip, mint extract, and chopped Thin Mint cookies. It was too light and fluffy, didn’t contain eggs, and wasn’t baked. Yeah, people talk about “no-bake cheesecake,” but is that really a thing?

I mean, it’s sitting right there on the… er, the pie stand!

Regardless of whether it was cheesecake, and regardless of whether it was pie, it was indisputably delicious. Shelly isn’t a big mint fan, but she still finished her piece. The brownie wouldn’t have been anything to write home about by itself, but with the minty [filling? topping? icing? cheesecake?] and the chocolate ganache, it was a very solid base for a great pie. Yes, pie.