Vermont Apple Pie

My new cook book mentioned this treat as a Thanksgiving dish so to honor that American holiday I made this exactly a week ago on Thanksgiving Thursday night. And yum! This is good! This has a little bit of the fall with the apples, a little bit of Christmas with the gingerbread, little bit of both with cinnamon. So the pie felt very fitting at this time of year, because Thanksgiving is a holiday that is somewhere halfway between fall and Christmas. My taste buds enjoyed this pie even better after it had cooled down and, apparently, so did my hubby's. This seemed to taste better by the day. My first experience with the new cook book was definitely a good one, and it wouldn't be impossible, if I made this a second time before baking anything else from the book!

I give the recipe in European measurements as that's how it was given in the book as well. I trust this recipe is a familiar one to American readers already. Also, the recipe uses a pie crust recipe from the same book. That recipe will follow the actual Vermont Apple Pie recipe. I cut down the amount of apples as it seemed to be so much (the apples were big and my mold wasn't huge). I give my changes in brackets. For this pie mold I'd also cut down the pie crust next time as well. I'm not sure, if cutting it to half would be too much. I intend to make this again and when I do, I'll try making it with less pie crust and afterwards can give my comments regarding this question. 

Vermont Apple Pie

1 unbaked pie crust (for that recipe scroll down)
8-10 apples (5)
1 dl sugar
1½ dl crushed gingerbread cookies
1 T flour
½ tsp cinnamon
a pinch of salt
1 dl crushed walnuts (I used a nut mix)
50 g melted butter
3/4 dl maple syrup

Turn on the oven to 175 C. Peel the apples and core them. Cut them into slices and place half of them on top of the pie crust. Mix sugar, crushed gingerbread cookies, flour, cinnamon, salt, walnuts and butter well together in a bowl. Spread half of the mix on top of the apples. Place the remaining apples on top and sprinkle the rest of the mix on top of them. Bake for 50 minutes. Heat the maple syrup until it almost boils. Pour over the apples. Bake for another 15 minutes.

Pie Crust

½ dl orange juice

1 egg

1 T sugar

1 tsp salt

5 dl flour

1 tsp vanilla sugar

200 g butter

Mix the orange juice, egg, sugar and salt in a small bowl. Mix the flour and vanilla sugar in a big bowl. Cut the butter into pieces and put in with the flour. Use a knife to cut the butter to smaller and smaller pieces until it has blended in with the flour. Add the orange juice mixture and mix until the whole thing is mouldable. Cover with a kitchen film and keep in cool for at least four hours.

I have to admit something. I noticed the "cool for 4 hours" when I was didn't have time to cool for 4 hours, so my pie crust stayed in the fridge for max 30 minutes. Then I just pressed it on to my pie mold. The rest of the recipe (which I'm not posting now, as this pie only needed unbaked pie crust) would have showed that this pie crust makes both the bottom and the top of a pie and that is one reason why I thought it might be good to have a little less of it in this pie, because it only needs the bottom and in my opinion it doesn't have to be as thick as it now was. 

Anyway, I loved this pie and I'm really glad that even with the occasional exhaustion my new job is giving me, I managed to bake something for Thanksgiving. The weekend is going to be a busy one with not a lot of time staying at home, but next week I'm hoping I'll manage to get some Christmas baking done too.l

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Lemon Meringue Pie

Now I actually have a good reason for the pause in blogging: vacation. For the whole of July we were almost everywhere but home and I have not baked or cooked a lot. Besides, the weather has been so hot and humid (and unlike Finland) that even the thought of a hot oven has convinced me to stay put near the fan and not to heat up the already too warm an apartment even more. But now we are back in the normal course of life and it's even a little bit cooler (although not a lot) and we hosted a meeting for our Bible Study group last night so I decided to bake something, and deal with the consequences of a hot oven.

During our vacation, my husband and I together with his parents spend two weeks in the State of Washington, USA to visit some newly found family of my father-in-law. Therefore, I found it only proper that the first recipe I blog after that trip is something typically American. I took this recipe from a cook book that I got for last Christmas called Maailman ihanimmat leivonnaiset (The world's most wonderful pastries). It is a Finnish cook book put together by a couple of journalists from the Finnish food magazine Maku (Taste). This was the first recipe which I tried from the book, although the wonderful pictures have drawn me to browse it through a number of times before. As this recipe is probably known to my readers across the Atlantic, I will give the recipe as it is in the book i.e. in metric measurements.

I really loved the combination of the little sour lemon pudding and the sweet fluffiness of the meringue. This is the first time I did this pie myself and I'm sure it's not the last. This was fairly easy and quick too, and not difficult to make it gluten-free, if you just use gluten-free flour.

Lemon Meringue Pie

about 10 pieces

Crust:
100 g butter
3 dl flour
2 tbs sugar
½ tsp baking powder
1 tbs water

Filling:
1½ dl sugar
2 dl water
1 dl lemon juice
2½ tbs corn starch
4 egg yolks
50 g butter
1 tbs vanilla sugar

Meringue:
4 egg whites
1½ dl sugar

Line the springform pan (about 24 cm in diameter) with a baking parchment. Grease and flour the pan.
Make the crust. Mix the dry ingredients with the room-temperatured butter. Then add the water and squeeze the dough to an even texture. Press the crust on the bottom and on the sides of the pan. Put the pan in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Heat the oven to 200 C. Put another piece of parchment of top of the dough in the pan and pour about 3 dl of dry peas, beans or rice. Press the parchment a little bit so that it stays on properly.
Bake it with the weight for 15 minutes on the lowest rack of the oven. Then take the weight off and bake for another 5 minutes.

When the pie crust is in the oven, make the filling. Measure all the ingredients except the butter and the vanilla sugar into a saucepan. Whisk continuously while the mix heats up until it thickens and starts to boil. Take the pan off the heat, add the butter and vanilla sugar while whisking.

Whisk the egg whites in a clean dry bowl until it is properly foamy. Add the sugar little by little. Continue to whisk until the foam is hard and glossy.

Pour the lemon filling on top of the pie crust and even. Spoon the meringue on top and make little waves in it. Bake the pie for another 10 minutes until the meringue is golden.

The pie is at its best just after cooling down.

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Strawberry pie topped with meringue

My friend invited my husband and I to celebrate her birthday and in the invitation email it was mentioned that guests can by all means include something yummy on the table. Because of our very plentiful strawberry supply I wanted to bake something out of them. The discuss forum at the Martha Organization website helped me once again. Although I have not made meringue since being a teenager I wanted to try out this easy recipe. I used oil instead of butter and gluten-free flour instead of regular. I also used whole frozen strawberries but you can use fresh berries or pieces of frozen berries as well. Also fruit pieces could work well here.

Base:

1 dl of cooking oil
1 dl of sugar
1 egg yolk
1 egg
2 dl of flour (I used gluten-gree, as mentioned)
1 tsp of baking powder
½ tsp of cardamom
½ dl of milk

Topping:

1 eggwhite
¾ dl of sugar
ca. 3-4 dl of whole frozen strawberries
ca. ½ tsp of vanilla sugar

almond chips on top

Prepare the meringue first so that the base does not have to wait. Beat eggwhite and sugar into a thick foam. You might want to add the sugar little by little, but I didn't.

Stir oil and sugar together. (If you use softened butter, you should beat the butter and sugar into a foam.) Add the egg and the egg yolk and beat. Mix up the dry ingredients and add to the foam mixture together with the milk. Stir only so much that everything mixes together.

Pour the base into a greased pie dish. Add the strawberries and vanilla sugar into the meringue foam and stir. Pour the mixture on top of the pie base and spread it evenly with a fork. Sprinkle almond chips on top. Bake for 35-40 minutes on the lowest rack in 175 C.

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Blueberry pie with strawberries by the Marthas

The day after the strawverry operation brought us guests that had more strawberries with them to give to us! I slightly changed my plans about dessert and blueberry pie ended up being a strawberry-blueberry pie. My favorite recipe for making a blueberry pie is the one I found online from the homepage of the Martha Organization. I came across it once as I was looking for a recipe for a big pie that covers to whole baking tray and I'm delighted about easyness and the foamy result.



The fantastic blueberry pie by Marthas (a whole tray)

1 egg
3 dl of sugar
1 cream viili, a form of viili, but made of cream
2 dl of milk
6 dl of flour
3 tsps of baking powder
125 g of margarine (which I have often replaced with 1 dl of cooking oil)
ca. 7 dl of berries

Mix egg and sugar. Add the cream viili, milk and the mix of flour and baking powder and towards the end also oil or melted margarine. Spread the butter onto a baking tray covered with baking paper. Sprinkle the berries on top. Bake in 200 C for about half an hour.

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