Apple Pie

After a wonderful tete-a-tete with my weighing machine, I had resolved to take a break from the wonderful world of baking. But my resolve didn't last long. I was reading Jamie Oliver's Family Dinners, and was drawn to the apple pie recipe like bees to honey. I tried to resist. But the picture of the half-eaten golden yellow apple pie in the book dominated my thoughts. All I could think of was apple pie. Even cinnamon would invade my thoughts (even though the recipe doesn't call for any cinnamon).

Finally, I caved in. Afterall, I rationalised, apple pie contains apples, and we are supposed to get our daily apple right? =)

So off I went baking again.

Apple pie is a whole new territory. I have never baked a pie, though I have often thought of it. I think I might have made some shortcrust pastry in Home Economics classes a long time ago, but I forget. The pastry appeared easy enough to make. All I needed to do was to dump the ingredients in the food processor and blitz.

However, the rolling it out and laying it in the tin showed up my inexperience. My dough was rather crumbly and kept tearing when I tried peeling it off the board, which I had liberally dusted with flour. Perhaps the humidity in Singapore (and the really hot few weeks we've been having) doesn't help. Of course, the fact that my pie dish was 9 inches rather than 8 inches, as required by the recipe, made it worse, as I had to roll the pastry out even thinner. But Mr. Oliver says it's OK if "it tears or breaks - just patch it up - as it will look nice and rustic". So I patched up as best I could, as my confidence was rapidly melting.

The second part of the recipe involved peeling and chopping the apples and cooking them into a saucepan with the rest of the filling ingredients (sugar, ground ginger, zest of lemon, sultanas). The recipe called for Bramley and Cox apples, but they aren't readily available here (if at all), so I substituted Granny Smiths for the Bramleys and Red Delicious and Gala for the Coxes. I also used regular brown sugar instead of the fancy muscovado/ demerara sugar.

As expected, I had a tough time getting the dough to fit the top of the pie. Witness the number of tears in the pastry. Also the pastry rim was very very thin.

The result was a not very nice looking pie. The pastry was a bit overdone and burnt at the edges because the pastry was thin, and I had failed to adjust the cooking time accordingly. But I was hopeful, because, the smells emanating from my oven were just heavenly!

I spooned out some pie, dolloped some custard on it and dug in. Oh my, it was good pie. It wasn't at all heavy. Not too sweet, either. It was almost perfect. For the next slice, I took out a tub of Ben and Jerry's Vanilla ice-cream and attacked. Ah, now, perfect...