Victory is Mine!!

Insert manaical laugh here. After three spectacular boilovers, the fourth attempt at New Brown Sugar Pie is a success. Thanks to the combined brainstorming of Chef and myself. The combination of a deep-dish crust and cutting the amount of sugar in half did the trick.

Finally. Brown sugar pies seem to have issues with altitude. Or maybe they were just bad recipes. But the tweaking is done.

Just Caramel Apple pie, maybe Crabapple (if someone comes up with an idea for a substitution for an ingredient so entirely out of season and not very popular to begin with) to go. And data entry. Yay.

48 hours, 14 recipes, 19 pies

Aside from a brown sugar pie that refuses to stop boiling over, it went smoothly. It's almost over, aside from the data entry. Yay.

To the left, Chestnut. Winner of this week's Most Expensive pie award - $16.00 worth of chestnut puree.

To the right, winner of this week's Surprisingly Good award - Gooseberry Pie. Also the winner of the Hardest to Find Ingredient award - the only place in town to carry canned gooseberries - Gold's Grocery. They were also the only store that had plums this week, so they get an award too.

Easy as pie.......

It's 12:33am. My last pie of the day is in the oven - five recipes for a total of 6 pies, because one made two pies. French apple, that one, although aside from thinly sliced apples there is nothing remotely French about it.

This one is Strawberry Daiquiri - it's creamy and is a groovy shade of 50's Cadillac Pink.

2 French Apple and "Hickory Nut" - which had to be made with pecans as hickory nuts are only available in certain areas of the country. They also have extremely hard shells which require a hammer and muscle power to crack. Pecans will do just fine.

This one got me free mounting and balancing of the new tires I had to put on my car. Caramel Coconut - it's a frozen concoction reminiscent of Mounds Bar crossed with a Samoa cookie.

Grape pie. One of the few recipes for such that doesn't require peeling the grapes. Seriously.

The fourth and finally successful attempt at blackberry pie. I really prefer berries to be fresh, but this wasn't bad.

It's been a rough week. 10-12 hours days at work, cake, cake and more cake. Then I come home to pie.......

It's 1:05 am. The kitchen is clean. My last pie - Damson Plum, variation #1 (made with regular plums because Damsons are not available) is out of the oven. It boiled over a bit. Which is ok. It's how you can be sure a fruit pie is done. Besides, I finally got around to buying a silicone mat for the oven. No more scraping - just wipe and go. Easy as pie.

Another 7 of which are waiting to be done........