Be forewarned: I have no idea why these pictures are coming in upside-down/sideways. I need to figure that one out and will edit when I do haha.

When Robbie and I were choosing our recipes for this week, the sour cream-blackberry pie sounded fantastic. I’ve never had a blackberry pie before, but anything with sour cream in it is sure to be good. As lovers of apple cider, the cider-infused apple pie sounded too good to NOT bake, so we went for it.

I’ll break down our pie-baking experience into three parts:

1)   THE PASTRY

The great thing about making two pies this week is that Robbie and I each got to attempt making a pie crust from start to finish. I was extremely intimidated by crust, but the process was actually pretty painless, save one little issue: determining how much water to add! I was paranoid about adding too much water and thereby loosing the pastry’s flakiness, but too little water turned out to be a bad thing.

When it came to rolling out my pastry, some huge cracks formed along the edges. It was pretty difficult to handle and almost fell apart while trying to transfer it from the counter to the pan. In the end, the pie crust wasn’t terrible, but I gained the following knowledge:

Crust Learning Point #1: One must not be too stingy with water while making the pastry.

Crust Learning Point #2: One must not be too stingy with flour. Too little flour on the counter before rolling out the pastry makes it nearly impossible to lift it off the counter without creating huge rips.

A photo of my lovely partner tackling large amounts of Crisco:

 

2)   CREATING THE APPLE PIE

The most difficult part about the filling of the cider infused apple pie was peeling/coring/slicing TWELVE CUPS of apples by hand!

The rest was easy. We stewed the apples for in ¾ cup of cider (a seemingly miniscule amount of cider given the number of apples) for five minutes.

We then added a little sugar, spice, other nice things, and threw them into Robbie’s pie crust. He made a beautiful design on the top crust with an impressive amount of vent holes.

I’m curious to see how the texture turned out. The apples got pretty mushy and we were bordering on applesauce-status. But it smelled so good while cooking; it’s got to taste good, at the very least 🙂

 

3)   CREATING THE BLACKBERRY PIE

This pie filling was very straightforward. The only finicky thing was prebaking the pie crust. The crust was hopping back and forth between the oven and the “freezer” (i.e. sitting on the open window sill), being baked with weights, without weights, with crust-browning-protector-things and without them, being stabbed by a fork, whose holes were then sealed up with egg whites, etc. It was a saga.

An hour later: BEHOLD, our prebaked pie crust:

The rest of the pie was a breeze. We changed the recipe slightly by doubling the amount of streusel topping (you can never have too much streusel, I am told).

The sour cream mixture being poured over the blackberries:

Our streusel-topped final product! Can’t wait to taste…I have no idea what to expect.

 

 

Tagged: apple, basic flaky pastry, blackberry, sour cream, streusel-top