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.
Early on in the year Shelly knew she wanted to make a S’mores Pie, but she felt she needed to wait until the summer to do it. She looked at several different recipes with several different approaches. Some had a chocolate pudding base, others had a richer ganache. Some used real marshmallows, others used marshmallow fluff. Some of them didn’t even use a graham cracker crust. She finally found a recipe that was almost perfect. But it used biscoff cookies for the crust. The horror! So we switched out the crust of this recipe with a graham cracker crust and it was perfect.
It had all the components of a fabulous s’more: graham cracker crust, salted chocolate ganache filling, and homemade marshmallow fluff. We even borrowed a kitchen torch from a friend to make it toasty on top.
If making this recipe again, we would use a little bit less salt in the filling, and cut the marshmallow fluff in half.
We we had to have two pies this day because we had two families over for dinner and we were going to be in Utah on Shelly’s actual week. But the s’mores pie was a huge hit.
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.
After my epic failure last time around (see Butterscotch Banana Cream Pie), I needed an epic redemption. So I created a new kind of pie: Cannoli pie. You can search up recipes with the title “Cannoli Pie” on the Internet, but they all have a regular ol’ pie crust and the filling is usually cream-cheese-based. They’ll have pistachios or chocolate chips and that’s supposed to make it taste like the deep-fried ricotta-cheese goodness of a cannoli? No thank you. Although it’s admittedly been quite a long time since I’ve actually had a cannoli, I have many fond memories of Mike’s Pastry in Boston, discovering what a good Italian pastry can do for a person. I needed to re-create that in pie form.
It’s pretty simple: cannolis have a deep-fried shell and a sweetened ricotta cheese filling. All I’d need to do is get a recipe for actual cannolis and turn the cylindrical shell into a bowl-shaped pie crust, and throw in the filling. But the hard part was going to be how to deep-fry dough and have it keep the shape of a pie. After discussing it with our friend Bryan, he suggested getting some wire mesh and making a form. So that’s what I did. I found some small-gauge chicken wire at Michael’s, and after a couple of attempts (yes, I did this two times this week in preparation for today’s actual pie), I figured out that the best way was to use one sheet of wire for the bottom, shaped into pie form, then another as sort of a cap to press the dough down as it bubbles and rises in the oil:
I even used some extra wire to make a handle to pull it out of the oil.
The other thing I needed to figure out was that all the cannoli recipes I could find called for white wine as an ingredient in the pastry. That’s not something we have or want to have around the house, so I read online that white wine vinegar was an adequate substitute. So we got some of that, and the first practice pastry used vinegar. It was a bit smelly, and the kids got turned off. When all was said and done, you could definitely taste it in the crust, and although it wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t the best. A little more research revealed that the wine/vinegar is used for flavor, but mostly for its acidity – it makes the gluten soft and elastic, which means you can roll it out thin which makes it crispier when fried (I learned that through trial and error too). Another acidic liquid you can use is buttermilk. That had the same effect on the dough, but it tasted a lot better.
Anyway, after placing the dough into the two-part form, when inserted into the pot of oil, it was necessary to use a mason jar to push it down, as the frying dough floats.
Thank you, Olsons, for the Christmas hot chocolate mix. You helped make cannoli pie possible.
It worked perfectly. The result was a deep-fried pie shell that looks like a cannoli shell:
The chicken-wire indentations actually add to the blistery texture, don’t they?
Then it was just a matter of whipping up some ricotta cheese with powdered sugar, vanilla, whipped cream, and mini chocolate chips. I found several recipes with very different ratios of ingredients, so I just kind of did it to taste – that also meant I got to keep snitching it over and over. Fearing that the filling-to-shell ratio would be a little out of whack, though, I fried a bunch of dough stars (using Kate’s Pay-doh cookie cutter) and arranged them on the top. Then a dusting of powdered sugar.
Behold the cannoli pie!
How did it taste? Just like a cannoli! The kids weren’t thrilled about the somewhat grainy texture of ricotta cheese. Shelly even reminded me that when she orders a cannoli, she’ll get a chocolate mousse one for that reason too. But this pie had a crunch and that sweet creamy goodness, and mini chocolate chips, and it was like I was back in the North End. Only eating pie. It was fantastic. Now I just need to think of what other pies could use a deep-fried crust..
-Matt
Crust recipe: 2C flour, 2 T sugar, 1/4 t salt, Half a stick of butter, 1 egg, enough buttermilk to make it stick together.
It’s not clear where Kate got the idea for unicorn pie. We might have suggested it to her. We found a recipe online, featuring a graham cracker-sprinkle crust and a white chocolate ganache-cream cheese filling, and Kate had to try it. There was a lot of anticipation for this one. Shelly and Kate made the crust the day before. Matt secretly made a marshmallow fondant unicorn horn for the middle of the pie, which was whipped out right before serving.
The unicorn pie was the best looking pie we’ve made yet this year, and honestly, it was one of the most universally enjoyed from a taste perspective. The filling was chocolatey and tangy but light, just how you would expect in a unicorn pie. Kate hits a home run again.
Realizing that the girls may never have had a traditional banana cream pie, Matt decided to introduce them to it, but with a twist. Following this recipe, he cooked up brown sugar, butter, and cream into homemade butterscotch. It’s possible he may have cooked it a little too long, as there was a detectable metallic burnt tinge to the filling. This wasn’t the most popular pie, even among our banana lovers. It was better the next day (after chilling), but it was the first pie of the year where some of it ended up in the trash can.
Ellie started the year off with oatmeal pie. It was warm and gooey and carmelly. Just like a bowl of sweet oatmeal in a pie crust. It was surprisingly similar to pecan pie. Ellie loved it, Matt and Shelly liked it, and the rest of the family didn’t care for it.
That’s one pretty cross-section, and one happy girl!
The Pie Project 