Pies make me happy!

I love pies! When the bakery was open, I would hand roll the pastry for hundreds of pies and make the fillings. One of my favourites is cherry pie, but not just any cherry pie, I want a great big sweet dough that tastes almost like a biscuit and melts in your mouth and inside I want Montmorency cherries that are so sour that you don't want them fresh. They are best in a pie with lots of organic cane sugar and a little bit of corn starch just to make them perfect when they are cool enough served with some Devonshire clotted cream.

But that is not the only pie I love! There is the sweet creamy filling of a pumpkin pie with traditional english spices made for Thanksgiving served after a huge Turkey and just before days of clubhouse sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey casserole and every other turkey leftover idea you can find in books and online. 

Then there is the delicious tarte au citron that Melanie gave me the recipe for. I have to say that there is nothing quite like a french lemon pie and a lemon meringue pie is NOTHING like it! Lemon meringue pie was not one of those pies that I craved when I went wheat free (in 1985) and I was okay not eating them, but the tarte au citron is so full of flavour and not too sweet and it doesn't look like the cloud of the meringue slipped into lemon jello when you cut it open. 

My Dad loves the strawberry-rhubarb pies that we did at the bakery and I have always made mine the same. He always tells me that it has enough rhubarb. Not too much, and not too little like most of the ones he has tried in Canada. Again, it is not too sweet. 

Raspberry pie was one that I had never made before I met Christine. She told me about raspberry pie and I had never heard of it. It seemed so foreign to me. I had raspberry jam tarts so I am not sure what seemed so strange about it, but it was a new one for me, but, it being her favourite, I was going to make one and I wanted it to be damn good!!!

That was not the strangest pie for me to make though, The strangest pie for me to make was a very common and traditional pie. Apple pie. I discovered that I was allergic to apples when I was 17 and have not eaten one since. I don't really miss them, I'm not even sure what they really taste like. However, at the bakery people would always ask for apple pies. so eventually with Christine's help I finally started making apple pies. She would make the filling and taste it and adjust and make it absolutely perfect. I would then roll out the pastry and scoop this mass of apples and organic cane sugar and cinnamon and then cover it with another layer of my favourite sweet dough. We would put these in the oven and the smell of them was like that of a log cabin on a wintry day where you are all sitting at the table next to the fire with a warm cup of tea. Funny how I had such an image in my head with the smell of these pies that I could never eat. 

Now that the bakery is closed and I am not rolling out hundreds of pies, I am playing more with pies and one of my most recent pies was the one above in a happy face. What a delight it was to present to a friend, a smiley faced pie. I am quite sure that I will show people how to do that at my upcoming workshop on pies. A pie that makes you smile twice!