A Slice of Apple Pie

Sometimes I wish I could take my favourite memories, experiences, feelings and just bottle them up. I’d visit them whenever I want, like a pensieve of sorts (forever a Harry Potter fan). One of the wonderful recollections I’d include in this fantasy bottle of mine would be Christmas morning in Ohio. Every year I’d wake up to the heady, sharp, and tangible smell of cinnamon mixed with the aroma of bubbling apples. Outside, the ground would be covered in an endless sea of delicate white, and some of our neighbours’ lights would still be on in the wee hours of dawn. On some of these days every year, we would try to bake an apple pie. I say try, because most of the time it turned out to be a hilariously epic failure, albeit a delicious one. We never could get the pastry right! So instead, we’d scoop out the apples and eat it like a crumble. At some point we stopped making apple pies altogether.

I started this blog last December, to celebrate my love of food and cooking. Ever since then I’ve tried to recreate some of the food I already love, and experiment with recipes that I’ve never tried before. This apple pie is one of many such concoctions. The poor thing is a bit deflated because I didn’t use as many apples as I should have, and looks a bit unseemly in my photographs, but I LOVED IT!! Even disasters can produce sweet little successes, and this one’s mine.

APPLE PIE

• Servings: 4-6
• Time: 2 Hrs 30 mins
• Difficulty: Medium
• Print

Ingredients

FOR THE PASTRY:

1. 2.5 Cups of flour
2. 250gms of butter
3. A few tablespoons of water
4. A teaspoon of salt
5. A teaspoon of sugar

FOR THE FILLING:

1. 5 Apples
2. A teaspoon of cinnamon
3. Brown sugar to your liking
4. A few drops of vanilla essence
5. Nutmeg to taste

Directions

1. For the rough pastry: Mix the flour and cold butter together in a chopper. Lumps are fine; they make the pastry light and puffed up. Slowly add in the water. You only want enough to form a workable dough. Do not overwork the pastry. Wrap it in clingfilm and refrigerate to firm up.
2. For the apple filling: Peel and chop the apples, adding them to a pan with a giant pinch of cinnamon, a few drops of vanilla, brown sugar and a dusting of nutmeg. 
3. To assemble the dish: Roll out the pastry, using extra flour to make sure that it doesn’t stick. Place one half of it to form the bottom layer. Blind bake for about 10 minutes just to make sure that the pie’s filling doesn’t make it soggy. Top the pie with the other half of pastry and decorate it as fancy as you’d like! Et voilà! Bon Appétite! 🙂