More apple recipes! 🙂 Yes, ’tis the season and seeing I love baking with apples so much, I thought that I would make this tart. Also, my dad will be here this evening, and he loves these French custard-style pies / tarts a lot. I browned the butter for the custard first, which gives it a lovely nutty flavor. Yum!
There must be a dozen blueberry pie recipes on this here site. Overall, I am guessing there must be at least 50 blueberry recipes in general, but given how much I love them, this isn’t a surprise. Each time I make a new pie, I do a little bit of a twist, whether it be “warm spices” (cinnamon, clove), or with a crumble top, etc. This time I went for a bit of a tart twist, with buttermilk, lemon and ginger. Quite lovely and fresh.
As promised, there is more pie. 🙂 Last week, I made a blueberry pie with this flower like pattern, made with a small, circular cookie cutter. I’d never tried that before, but loved the way that it turned out, so I made another pie this week along the same lines. The filling also involved blueberries, but also plums and blackberries — very late summer-ish. Note the little heart with wings in the middle … it’s all in the details, eh?
Pie! What would a 4th of July BBQ be without pie?!? Every year, I make one and this year, it ended up being Vanilla Bourbon Cherry Blueberry Pie … Cherries from from Washington State, Blueberries from Maine, Bourbon from Kentucky. That pretty much covers it. Celebrate well this weekend, folks, and Happy Independence Day!
You guys know me: always putting slightly odd ingredients in sweet, baked dishes. Sometimes it is by mistake (i.e. the chili powder that accidentally replaced the cinnamon in an apple pie — though that was a happy accident as it was really good) and sometimes intentional (pepper and bitters in strawberry pie the other day; also really good). This time I thought I would do another “intentional experiment”: red wine and Chinese 5-spice powder in cherry pie. While there is some dispute about what is even in five spice powder (some mixtures have anise, cinnamon, star nnise, cloves, and ginger while others replace the ginger with Sichuan peppercorns or fennel. And then there are other 5-spice mixtures what have all of those, which would actually make it 7 spice mix, but who’s counting?!?). And the red wine of course goes great with the cherries. So, another happy experiment.
I’m not sure this is tremendously “summery” really. I guess this strikes me more as an autumn pie, but cherries are harder to come by then, but you could always used jarred cherries, I suppose.