Alpha Bakers: Black and Blueberry Pie

For Christmas, my husband surprised me with several things from Anthropologie home/kitchen section. One of them was the rolling pin in the above photo. When I opened the nicely wrapped rolling pin on Christmas morning, I hold the handle on each hand and made the motion in the air as if I'm rolling a dough. He looked at me and said in a serious tone "I didn't intend for you to use it for baking. I thought you can use it for pictures." Well, he is right, the pin is made from ceramic so I suppose pressing on it is probably not a good idea, :).

I am not very excited about pie but I love Rose's cream cheese pie crust. I think it's the best pie crust. I have made other pie crust (Rose's flaky pie crust and also recipes from other authors). The cream cheese pie crust wins every time. So even though I am not a huge pie fan, I am looking forward to this because of the pie crust. Also, I get to use my new 4 inch ruffled pie pan and take photos of the new for-photography-only rolling pin.

I made 1/4 recipe of this pie. This time I remembered to measure in volume my 9 inch pie pan vs. the 4 inch pie pan. By volume the 4 inch pie pan is 1/4 the 9 inch. So all set to divide everything by 4.

Making the crust.

I froze the leftover cream from the Frozen Pecan Tart. Do you know that you can freeze heavy cream and use it? It won't whip but you can use it for another tart dough or for ganache. The other frozen things in this picture is lemon juice! I am trying something new since I bought too much lemon a few weeks ago. As it turns out it was possible to freeze and defrost lemon juice. The small cube in the below photo got defrosted and used as the lemon juice ingredient for this pie filling.

1 cube of previously frozen heavy cream.

The texture looks a little funny when it's defrosting. Like the liquid and cream are separating, but all you need to do is mix it with a spoon and they combine and become heavy cream liquid.

Dry ingredients: flour, salt, baking powder.

Add cream cheese.

Rub cream cheese and dry ingredients until it's coarse meal.

Add butter.

Disregard instructions to use zip lock and mix it with the cream and cider vinegar by hand. The dough then went into a tupperware container to rest in the fridge for 2 hours.

Rolling the dough.

I think it's odd that such a small pie pan has very deep ruffles. It is cute, no doubt, but I find it makes it a bit hard to drape the pie dough evenly.

Making the filling.

Sugar, cornstarch, and lemon zest.

Pause for a second and take pretty photos of the berries...

Add blackberries.

Action shot of adding blueberries.

Mix and mix.

Add to the pie plate.

Add the dough hat.

Tuck the hat border underneath the bottom border and crimp the edges with a fork.

Add 5 slashes across the top, as instructed. Is it just me or does this look like pot pie?!?!!?!!!

Baking the pie.

Preheat the oven to 425'F 45 minutes before baking with a pizza/baking stone in it.

I baked the pie for 20 minutes, then another 25 minutes. The filing looks like they start bubbling through the slashes but the top crust still looks pale. So I took off the foil cover and bake again for 15 minutes. By this time the whole filling is bubbling and some juices overflowed. Juice overflow = done so I took it out of the oven.

Tasting the pie.

This is a fantastic pie. It is a tad too sweet, as most pies are for me, but it's good! The first slice that I cut fell apart so I thought I did something wrong again, but then the second slice actually hold together. It was already dark when this happened so I didn't take a photo - you're just gonna have to take my word for it, :).

Alpha Bakers is a group of bakers who are baking through The Baking Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum's latest cookbook. Come check out the rest of the group at Rose's Alpha Bakers.

Click here for a full listing of all the recipes we are baking.