Cannoli Pie

April 14, 2019

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.

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.

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.

Pi Day

March 14, 2019

Just when this pie-every-week thing has gotten going, Pi Day rolled around. We wanted to celebrate, since this is the Year of Pie for our family, but we had just had Unicorn Pie on Sunday, and another one was coming up the following Sunday. That’s a lot of pie, even for us. So we purchased a small marionberry pie for $3.14 and ate pizza for dinner and called it good. Ellie and Matt were the only ones willing to eat a tasty berry pie, so the others just missed out. It didn’t even have any seeds! We also learned that the marionberry is not a relative of the blackberry, but rather a particular strain of blackberry, developed in Marion County, Oregon. Pacific Northwest for the win!

Unicorn Pie

March 10, 2019

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.

Butterscotch Banana Cream Pie

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.

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.