As I sit here, we are approaching Easter weekend and it’s already full of family events and the promise of great food and my future mother-in-law’s pie. It is promising to be a great weekend reconnecting with some family members I haven’t seen since Christmas and I am truly looking forward to the pie….I mean the visiting.
Since the new year I have been delving into baking because of a new stand mixer my hunny bought me, I have really enjoyed making bread and buns and different kinds of baking but I haven’t tried to make pie.
I have a lifetime, and now a new lifetime of master pie makers in my life; my mom and my sister and now my future mother-in-law.
Even my daughter has taunted me with her flaky pastry and Instagram pictures of beautiful creations and I am forever afraid to try to make pie.
Besides the intimidation, I have had two negative experiences making pie.
Once when I was a young, wide-eyed bride I had a pail of Saskatoons that I had picked at our lake property and I was stoked to get home and make the Saskatoon pie I remembered from my youth.
Two problems; I had never made pastry crust and I discovered that I did not own a rolling pin.
After figuring out that you don’t put yeast in pie crust and weeping on the phone to my mom, I did my best by rolling the crust out with a can of soup – it had funny lines in it but it seemed to look like crust so I filled it with the beautiful berries.
Something went wrong, the filling was too runny, and the crust was a disaster and it ended up a soggy mess on the bottom and a Jurassic style petrified covering on top.
In all seriousness you needed a steak knife to cut through the crust and can we just agree that there was a lot of pie left over. It was not the Martha Stewart moment I had always dreamed about and I stayed far away from anything with pastry crust for decades.
Now, in 2016 I am dating a wonderful man from a wonderful family with a wonderful mother who bakes pies that defy gravity with the most melt-in-your-mouth pastry you have ever tasted! My new(ish) boyfriend asks for lemon pie for his 50th birthday party and as I was trying to impress I said sure!
Oh, you dumb woman. But, I wasn’t going to get trapped this time! I snuck to his mom’s and asked her to make the pastry crust for me and I would roll it out and fill it and present these beautiful birthday pies to my sweet on his birthday.
Can you imagine anything going wrong?
Even though a master had made me the dough, I still have no experience or knowledge in rolling and fitting and of course when I pre-baked the crust it shrunk and stiffened up.
The end result was a luscious lemon cream pie with a crust about an inch thick which resulted in many plates with cleaned out pieces of pie crust….I don’t think the dog ate them either.
I hope you all had a happy Easter and that your pie was perfect and your eggs were excellent!
Kim Wyse is a Central Alberta freelance designer. Find her on facebook at ‘Associate Royal Lepage Tamarack Trail Realty’.
