I wanted to do something special for Andrew’s birthday, so I decided that instead of a regular birthday cake, I would be adventurous and try to make his favorite pie — Shoo Fly Pie! Those who know me well, know that I’m fairly accident-prone when it comes to all things kitchen related. But! I was feeling lucky, so I decided to give it a shot.
For starters, since I had never had the pie myself I had to do a little research to make sure I was doing it right. I found a great article that told me pretty much everything I needed to know. I then found two fabulous recipes ( 1, 2).
One seemed a little more complicated than the other, but if Andrew’s taught me anything about cooking, its that seasoning makes all the difference. So I decided to attempt the one with more ingredients. As I was on a bit of a budget I first raided Andrew’s spice rack to see what I could find. What I couldn’t find was ground cinnamon and ground cloves. Improvised and used the first recipe with the additional ingredients that I had from the second recipe, and came up with a sort of hybrid recipe of my own — SCARY, I know.
Everything I needed to bake a pie! (Except the crust, of course)
I went shopping/spice-rack-raiding the day before I was set to make the pies, but I was SO excited to get started (as this was a great baking adventure for me!) I decided to mix the ingredients the night be fore!
Dry mixture of flour, cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg and salt.
The next day I got started with the wet ingredients. One recipe called for an egg here. The other did not. I had a choice to make!
Mixing the wet ingredients -- Boiled water, baking soda, molasses, syrup, and an egg (maybe).
After the wet ingredients were thoroughly mixed I poured them into the pie crust. After that I had to cut the butter into the dry ingredients with my brand new pastry blender until they made tiny pea-sized crumbs. (Pastry blenders are not only good for pie making, but also good for guacamole making, as I later found out!).
Yummy dry mixture + yummy wet mixture!
Next up, you spoon the dry mix on top of the wet mix in the pie shell. At first I was afraid the dry ingredients would sink and mix in with the wet ingredients, but I was surprised to find the mixture floated, even though there was so much of it. Fancy!
Like so.
See how pretty??
After the first pie was ready for baking, it was time for my backup pie! (You didn’t seriously think I would go to all this trouble with out a back-up, did you??)
Ta da! Pie number two is good to go.
I followed the amounts for the dry ingredients in the second recipe for the first pie. It called for a lot more than the first recipe. So for the second pie I decided to try it a little different and use the measurements given in the first recipe, plus the egg this time. Confusing, I know. But why make two pies if you’re going to make them exactly the same? You can see in the picture that the second pie has less dry mix going on.
I put the pie mix in the oven and turned around to face what was left:
My mess.
So I while I waited for the pies to bake I cleaned up. I didn’t want anything to go wrong, so naturally I was checking the oven every 5 minutes to make sure nothing was burning (my oven and myself have a history of burning, you see).
After what felt like a million years …
The pies were done!
And now you understand exactly why there were two pies.
Both pies turned out well in the end. Delicious! If I do say so myself (Andrew will totally back me up on this one). Even the crumbled one was delicious. But I’ve learned my lesson for next time. The mixture with smaller measurements works better because the other one rose too high, and when I opened the oven door to check it, the cool air caused it to collapse. OOPS!
Oh well, the pies were a hit! Andrew was completely surprised, and absolutely loved them. Mission accomplished.
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