The Great Adventure- Day Two

Posted: March 9, 2011 | Author: Alyssa | Filed under: Alyssa, The Great Adventure | No Comments »

PIE!  While our biscuits didn’t turn out the way we expected (totally my fault), making biscuits did give me a nice segue into making pie crust.  Its basically the same thing: cut butter into flour and add liquid.  So we started out making our crusts with the end goal of making three pies: apple, chocolate chip, and sugar cream.  I’m pretty sure by the end of the day the kids were totally over the process of cutting butter into flour since its a giant pain in the tuchas without a food processor.  But they did a fantastic job and we made a total of 10 pie crusts and made 9 pies.  We made one apple pie as a group, because thats what we had enough apples for and then four pies of the other two.  

The apple pie turned out really well, although I think some of the kids prefered to eat the precooked apples more than the pie itself.  Not that I blame them, I do the same thing.  We started by peeling and coring eight apples, which was pretty amusing for me.  I’m surprised at how many kids aren’t comfortable using a knife, even to cut an apple.  I guess its a good thing that they aren’t well versed in weaponry, but it was still a little surprising.  After the apples were prepped we added a cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour, 1 tsp of cinnamon, a pinch of salt and a pinch of nutmeg.  Everyone did well rolling out their crust, although tomorrow I think we are going to have a discussion about over-flowering.  We set the crust in the pie pan, tossed in the apples, topped with a second crust and voila!  Ten minutes at 450 and 40 minutes at 350 and we had a fully baked apple pie. 

While that was baking/cooling, we got started with the chocolate chip pie and sugar cream pie.  Both of these are single crust pies, but neither are blind baked.  

Chocolate Chip Pie: 

1 cup each flour, sugar and brown sugar. 

2 eggs 

1 stick of butter 

1 cup of chocolate chips coarsely chopped. 

Bake 325 for an hour.  Some of the kids got a little overzealous with the chocolate chips.  If you add a couple extra, no big deal, but if you add a whole extra cup, it really starts to mess with the structural integrity of the pie.  Unfortunately we are still having trouble with one of our ovens, so these got a little too cooked and I forgot to bring foil to prevent the crust from over baking.  We still ate the ones that weren’t too overcooked and they tasted pretty good.  

A little toasty...But delicious!

The sugar cream was pretty easy, just mix together 1 1/3 cups of sugar, 1/2 cup flour, 1 cup cream, 3/4 cup milk and pour it into the unbaked pie crust.  Dot with small pieces of butter and sprinkle with nutmeg.  Bake for 10 minutes at 450 and 30 minutes at 350.  These came out looking great and I’m excited for the kids to try them.  This pie is very sweet and creamy, so its normally served with a less sweet whipped cream. All in all a good day.  Day three will begin by using the left over pie scraps to make BBQ chicken empanadas with some pie for dessert.