The Beatles said it best:
“Honey pie,
Honey pie,
Honey pie,
Honey pie,
I love you.”
I first made this salted honey pie from Four and Twenty Blackbirds back in the summer and we loved it so much I made it again for Canadian Thanksgiving in October. Initially our dinner guests were a bit disappointed there was no pumpkin pie (not my favourite, and one of the perks hosting is you get to choose the menu 
) but after the first bite of this salty-sweet confection, all complaints were erased.
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This is another pie from The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, and boy, do they really know their stuff. In fact, this may be the tastiest pie that I’ve ever made. I’ve never done much baking with apricots and holy smokes are they ever delicious here! I loved their tart floral flavour next to the warmth of the cinnamon. I finally found Angostura bitters in the grocery store (I guess I didn’t look hard enough last time!) and I like what they added to this pie – the flavour I got from them was almost like allspice, and it was really good with the apricots.
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Recently, the Food52 Baking Club had The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book as our cookbook of the month, which means that I now have three gorgeous pies to share with you. I don’t own this cookbook and couldn’t justify adding to my collection (but that might change… #cookbookhoarder), but I managed to find several recipes online, and after making two of their pies I was convinced to finally join our local regional library so I could get my hands on the actual book!
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How is it that I had never made a lemon meringue pie before now? In fact, I’m not even sure I’d ever actually eaten lemon meringue pie before I made this half-size one – which is surprising, because lemon things are second only to chocolate things on my dessert hierarchy. I’ve eaten many a lemon curd tart, but not a lemon meringue pie. What is the difference, you might ask? Well, according to me, the differences are:
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According to Instagram, it’s been rhubarb season since about January, judging by all the gorgeous rhubarb baked goods that have been showing up in my feed since then. I guess spring comes a lot later here in the Far North (ha) because even now that it’s mid-May, the rhubarb in my garden is not quite ready to harvest yet. But it has finally been showing up in the grocery store, and when I snapped some up a few weekends ago I knew exactly what to do with it: I had just seen a delicious looking rhubarb and marzipan cake, and my first thought was, “That would make a good pie.”
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I’m a sucker for a beautiful pie, and especially a strawberry rhubarb one, so even though rhubarb season may be nearing an end, I had to share this pie I made a while back. I love love love rhubarb pie, and this one is a riff on Anne Dimock’s Straight-Up Rhubarb Pie as seen on Food52 – which is a damn good rhubarb pie and needs no embellishment – but when I made this one, the very first strawberries of the season were also hitting the grocery store and I couldn’t resist.
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From the depths of winter, I am particularly grateful to my past self for having cut up and frozen the bag of rhubarb that I recently unearthed from the back of my freezer. My normal go-to for rhubarb is a crisp or crumble of some kind, but I remembered the custard-topped rhubarb pie I’d seen Julie make. Rhubarb and custard are a classic pairing, and this particular pie combines them with a cinnamon and brown sugar-kissed oatmeal cookie crust. So basically all the best parts of a rhubarb crisp with vanilla ice cream – aka frozen custard – composed in a such a way that when you cut slices you end up with these lovely layers.
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I made this chocolate, bourbon and maple syrup-laced pecan pie about a month ago for Canadian Thanksgiving after finally admitting that I don’t like pumpkin pie all that much – I mean, it’s OK, but I can think of probably a dozen other desserts I’d rather eat. And after tasting this pie, all I can ask myself is, “why was I holding on to pumpkin for so long?!” Gooey maple custard, crunchy pecans, a good dose of bourbon, and some dark chocolate to cut through the sweetness: now THAT is a pie worth making every year. It sounds like a lot of things going on in one pie, but they are all the perfect complement to one another. The only thing that could have used some work was my pie crust, which – to be honest – has never been the tender, flaky masterpiece I’ve always wanted it to be.
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I’m going to say it: fall is my favourite season. I know everyone loves summer because SUNSHINE, but I love fall because SWEATERS, and SOUP, and CRISP MORNINGS, and FIRES IN THE FIREPLACE. Fall fees like a relief after a long, hot, parched summer – at this time of year, the weather is still pretty gorgeous but we’ve had a bit of rain so everything is green again, just in time for the riot of fall colours as the leaves start to turn. Not to mention the absolute bounty of fall produce. I’ve been at the local farmers market every Saturday for the past three weeks, just soaking in the gorgeous fall veggies, filling my cloth bags to the brim with massive heads of broccoli and cauliflower, big orange squash, peppers, kale, chard, and salad greens. Of course there are apples, but to my surprise, there is also one stand that is still selling local strawberries in October!
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As much as I love making pies, the simplicity and ease of a galette is pretty hard to beat. No fancy equipment needed, no special skills or pastry techniques – just a good pie crust recipe and some perfectly ripe fruit. It’s still pretty early in the season for local fruit around here, so I used plums from California. I absolutely love the tart, jammy flavour of cooked plums, and they are just gorgeous when baked: the gradient from yellow flesh to reddish-purple skin is so pleasing. I added a little bit of fresh thyme (plums love thyme, believe me) and some almond cream underneath the fruit, because it helps to soak up some of the fruit juices that inevitably leak out of a galette, and also, YUM.
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