Before Thanksgiving, someone (a non-vegan) asked me what kind of pies I was making. My first response (pumpkin) received an mmm of approval. My second response (vegan apple, with an olive oil crust) was met with a look of disgusted incomprehension.

I was uneasy about the olive oil too. For a long time, I considered both vegan baking and gluten-free baking to be, well, inferior. Now, I think it’s more appropriate to say they are scary, particularly for someone who has never tried.

Now, pretend I had never mentioned olive oil. Does this pie look any different from your average buttery, lardy pie?

Not really. And while the crust certainly tasted differently, it was still a flaky, crisp, complement to the tart apple filling. To my genuine surprise, at a ten-person Thanksgiving dinner with one vegan in attendance, this was the pie everyone wanted, and it was the only dessert to be eaten in its entirety.

If you have never tried vegan baking, I have a few suggestions.
1) Start simple. Don’t pick the strangest, most tricked-out multi-flavor vegan cheesecake you can find.
2) Find a good recipe. Ask your vegan friends for cookbook recommendations, or find a blog/website that seems reputable. Don’t just pick the first thing you found on Google.
3) Don’t get discouraged. Just because one recipe turns out badly doesn’t mean you should forego all vegan baking. Give yourself some time to figure out what you like and how to use potentially unfamiliar ingredients.

I picked this recipe because I’ve had success with Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero’s recipes, and olive oil is more appetizing to me than vegan shortening and margarine products. I hope you enjoy it!
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I am still recovering (mentally, emotionally) from last week’s tornado devastation. We are lucky to have our health and our home intact. If you would like to make a donation to the relief effort, you can do so here: http://www.uwwa.org/donatenow.html.

Posts have been sparse lately, so I wanted to leave you with this pie I made over the weekend. I used a half shortening-half butter crust, but feel free to use your favorite.
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I’ve been working my way through Joanne Chang’s Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe. It’s the sort of baking book I like- one that’s been adapted for home cooks, but still offers a challenge for readers with advanced skills and specialty equipment. I have similar feelings about Kate Zuckerman’s The Sweet Life and Sarabeth Levine’s Sarabeth’s Bakery.

So far, Chang’s recipes have been reliable and delicious. I especially liked this tart- the pate sucree is crunchy, delicate, and punctuated with bits of kosher salt. The filling is indulgent, not too sweet, and smooth on your tongue. When I visited Flour Bakery in Boston, my impression was that Chang appreciates well-browned baked goods. All the breakfast pastries were crisp, flaky, and flavorful. I’m particularly obsessed with the craquelines, brioche pastries stuffed with candied orange and topped with a crunchy sugar-almond glaze.

Some notes: the tart pastry is quite delicate. If it tears, just press some extra dough scraps into the pan. You can also chill the dough briefly before transferring it to the pan. Enjoy!
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Most of the people I know eat cake on their birthday- a special cake that’s reserved specifically for the occasion. Growing up, I’d ask my mother for one of three cakes: a lemon cake, a German chocolate cake, or an angel-food cake. They were the cakes she made most frequently. I wonder- did she make them because I liked them? Or did I like them because she made them often?

I’m not sure how we choose our favorites. For a long time, tradition dictated my choices. Now, they are more influenced by personal taste and rarity. I pick things I haven’t had in a long time, or things that take considerable time and effort to execute. I was home for my birthday this year, and I asked my mom for an apple crisp. There was a year in college when I desperately wanted an impeccably decorated birthday cake from Whole Foods. Mom let me buy two.

Perhaps it’s not about what we want to eat on our birthdays, but how we want to feel. People rarely bake for me, so I feel extremely indulged when someone makes me a cake. It is a gesture that expresses great thoughtfulness- much like buying someone the perfect Christmas gift instead of giving them a gift card.

This is my third year making my husband a lemon meringue pie for his birthday. I make it for him because he likes it. I also make it because it gives me an occasion to perfect a single recipe. There are many recipes I make repeatedly, but few I make predictably, with such intense focus. It’s not just a pie- it’s a gift of time, effort, and care.

I’ve added some new notes to the recipe below, which appeared on my old blog. If you compare the above photo with this photo, you can see how mistakes can impact the texture. One has a dense filling and a creamy meringue- the other has an aerated filling and a stiff meringue.To swirl the meringue like I have in the photo, shape it into a dome, and then angle a spoon or spatula into the meringue. Rotate the pie to shape a swirl, moving your spatula from the bottom of the meringue to the top.
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I have a soft spot for Australian cookbooks. It began when a magazine contribution by Donna Hay led me to an assortment of her cookbooks at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library, which in turn led me to a sizeable selection of British and Australian food magazines. Both the magazines and the blogosphere introduced me to two other notable Australian chefs: Bill Granger and Christine Manfield. These author’s titles had similarities: a unique photographic style, recipes with clean flavors, and convenient metric measurements.

I knew a little about these chef/authors when I started buying their books, but I knew nothing about Belinda Jeffery when I bought Mix & Bake (Penguin Global, 2008). Frankly, I pre-ordered it for the cover art. I was delighted to find it contained some great recipes that ranged from comforting to dramatic. Jeffery is an excellent writer with a lively, encouraging voice, and I find it disappointing that she is not better known stateside.

Her latest book, The Country Cookbook, arrived at my door on the heels of several urbanite-turned-farmer books (see reviews for Miller, Kimball, and Timmermeister: 1, 2, 3). Keeping with this theme of urban egress, The Country Cookbook chronicles a year following Jeffery’s move from Sydney to a country home in Mullumbimby, NSW. It is a diary with accompanying recipes and photographs, which can be read from start to finish, or browsed by season. While the diary format may be off-putting to some, I found it intimate and highly evocative. Jeffery clearly takes joy in her surroundings, which are sumptuously photographed by Rodney Weidland. (See a book preview and an interview with Jeffery on Penguin Australia’s site).

As I mentioned earlier, I love Australian cookbooks. I will warn you, however, that they can contain vocabulary which some Americans may find hard to interpret. Luckily, I’ve had few (if any) problems cooking from this book, as Jeffery’s instructions are clear and easy to follow. It contains a good balance of courses, suitable for many occasions. On another note, there are not one, but -two- ribbons in the book for marking your favorite recipes!

I will leave you with this recipe for a fabulous Apple & Cinnamon Crostata, which we enjoyed with homemade cinnamon ice cream. I baked it on a pizza stone, which made the crust well-browned and thoroughly crisped. If you want a perfectly round crostata, use a circular pan, or trace a 12-inch circle on parchment to assist you with rolling and shaping.
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The latest cover of Martha Stewart Living features a ‘pie’ composed of individual slices of thanksgiving pies. How wonderful would it be to bake one thanksgiving pie that would please everyone?

I’ve made exactly two pumpkin pies in the past two years. The first was a buttermilk pumpkin pie from Nick Malgieri’s The Modern Baker. While I didn’t love it, I like to say it’s the pie won me a husband. I had just served two slices to visiting friends when my ride to a swing dance showed up unexpectedly early. In a panic, I abandoned my friends in my apartment and told them i’d retrieve the keys from them later. At the end of the night, I offered a leftover piece to the man who’d eventually ask me to marry him. Less than a week later, we went on our first date.

A year later, we were baking the second pie together for our first thanksgiving in Alabama. It was Cook’s Illustrated’s pumpkin pie, which incorporates candied yams for better texture. The pie was slightly undercooked and dotted with chunks of unpureed yam, but I still remember it fondly.

Like those two pies, this butternut squash pie is linked to fond memories. It’s a pie I shared with neighbors and coworkers. It’s a recipe that perpetually made more filling than the crust would hold. It hasn’t marked particularly momentous occasions, but it’s my favorite. This recipe is definitely a keeper, and it’s my recommendation for your thanksgiving table.
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I have a love/hate relationship with pecan pie. I love the crunchy, sugar crusted pecans on top. In fact, I love them so much i’ll pick them off my piece, one by one. The problem lies between the crunchy topping and the bottom crust. It’s the sugary, gelatinous gloop that I can’t stand.

Naturally, I gravitate towards pecan pie recipes that incorporate more than the standard corn syrup, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and salt. I look for sweeteners like golden syrup, honey, or raw sugar, and flavors like alcohol, chocolate, or spices. My go-to favorite has been Richard Sax’s recipe from Classic Home Desserts. Another way to avoid the filling is to make a variation like pecan bars or pecan tassies. If you’re not wedded to pecans, you can also try a caramel+nut pie, like this honey caramel walnut tart.

Criticisms aside, this pie was pretty good. It ranked high on the ‘speed of coworker consumption’ scale. The filling rather looked liked melted chocolate- it even oozed a bit when I cut into it. Note that this isn’t a pecan pie with chocolate chunks- it’s a pecan pie with melted chocolate mixed into the filling.
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I post this recipe at the request of friends and family members who have waited patiently since October 2008. Time moves faster for me than it used to- I tried this pie almost two years ago, but it feels like yesterday. I blink and a week passes between blog posts.

So here it is. I have some new notes:
I have better luck with the dough when I omit the water. I only add it if the dough seems dry. Also, it’s important not to under cook the apples. If they release more liquid while they cool, do not add it to the custard. The crumb topping will sink into the filling if it is too loose.

If you want to try other recipes, Leite’s Culinaria has a deep dish variation with lemon and cardamom. I used local apples from Petals from the Past. I’m excited to see that they have a Kumquat harvest in November (jam for Christmas, anyone?)
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A rep from POM Wonderful offered to send me a case of pomegranate juice and I accepted. I was curious to see what I could do with it in the kitchen. Today, I can cross two items off the list of things i’ve never done: make a gelée, and drink pomegranate juice straight from the bottle.

I’ll confess that this tart wasn’t my first experiment with the juice. I tried to make a pomegranate chiffon cake, which didn’t turn out well. The pomegranate flavor was overwhelmed by orange zest, and the color was an unfortunate shade of brown. Disappointed, I decided to look for recipes that would really showcase the product. I’ve bookmarked a few different sauces, custards, gels, and glazes that I hope to try in the near future.

This tart from Flo Braker’s Baking for all Occasions sounded too interesting not to try (most of the recipes in that book are a little out of the ordinary). The crust has cornmeal and citrus zest in it, and the lemon-lime custard is topped with pomegranate seeds and jewel-like cubes of pomegranate gelée. (I omitted the pomegranate seeds, but they would have been great textural contrast). I don’t care much for jello, so I was glad to see that the gelée was very softly set.

A warning if you plan to try this recipe- the tart must be completely cool before you add the gelée. Otherwise, it will melt instantly. Alternately, you can pour the gelée on top of the chilled tart and let it set in one piece instead of cutting it into cubes. I wanted a geometric look, though- something reminiscent of the Cook’s Country Stained Glass Cake.

I really enjoyed the combination of pomegranate and citrus, and I think the gelée would make a great topping for a cheesecake. You can find the full recipe here.

I bought some unbelievable fruit from the Pepper Place Saturday Market, a place that’s helped ease my longing for Pittsburgh’s Strip District. The market is one of several perks to living in the South, including a longer growing season, truckloads of Chilton County Peaches, and great fish and shellfish. I could go on about things like grits, biscuits, scuppernogs, muscadines, and the local breweries and dairies…

I love the flexibility of fruit pies. I remember reading one cookbook that described how fruit texture, juiciness, and sweetness affect your choice of crusts, thickening-agents, and sweeteners. It even told you how much filling (by weight) to put in different sized pies. Much to my chagrin, I can’t remember which book it was!

The point i’m trying to make is you don’t have to follow recipes to the letter, especially when your instincts tell you there’s something wrong. I mostly read fruit pie recipes for inspiring flavor combinations. Then, I substitute my favorite ingredients, crusts, and toppings. I have made enough pies to know when I need to par-bake the crust, when I can get away without using pie weights (usually beans or pennies), and when I need to adjust the baking time or temperature.

This tart was a mashup of recipes from The LA Times, Ken Haedrich’s Pie, and Mentesana & Audureau’s Once Upon a Tart. I often pull components from Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts and titles by Carole Walter, Maxine Clark, and Nick Malgieri. If you have some other titles to suggest, let me know!
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