apple pie and archie comics

I love apple pie. Simple to make, tastes amazing, smells terrific and is incredibly comforting on a winter’s night (of which we’ve had way too many…summer please Melbourne!). I was very eager to get started on my apple pie for this week’s blog post. Again, I used my Williams-Sanoma cookbook and lugged home the six apples I needed for the recipe during my usual tram ride home from work.

I put aside a whole day and got to work peeling, slicing and coating my apples in a delicious sugar-cinnamon mix. I covered my pie dish in pastry and then assembled the whole lot until it was one giant mound of apple. I put the second layer of pastry over the top, cut a few slits for the steam and popped the pie into the oven. And waited. (And made sure I had vanilla ice cream in the fridge.)

Apple pie is quite the iconic symbol of the USA. But not half as American as...Archie Andrews! My sister and I had quite the Archie comic collection growing up. It helped immensely that each Saturday we’d have to accompany our parents to their place of business, which just happened to have a newsagency next door. We would spend our weekly allowance buying up every comic they had and then we'd read them from cover to cover, while eating potato cakes and watching Saturday morning cartoons. Oh, how simple life was back then.

Archie and the gang had so many adventures! I loved when they went to Pops, often wishing we had our own soda-fountain-type diner to hang out in, and since I was a brunette, I immediately aligned myself with the fabulous Veronica (the original, and best, Queen B). Pies were always showing up in Archie’s universe. Jughead would be at a pie-eating contest, Betty and Veronica would be selling them at a bake sale, and there was one comic strip in particular that had a really terrible pie joke in it. I laughed just the same.

The first time I went to the States, I bought an Archie comic for old time’s sake and it was quite the thrill.

I loved living in Archie’s world, and it seems that the popularity of the gang remains strong today. A gay character that was recently introduced to Riverdale has received his own series, just proving how Archie is progressing with the times. It was nice visiting Archie again for this blog post, and my pie turned out really well, too!

Next stop, cherry pie: take 2.

s'mores pie and the baby-sitters club

I think this post was inevitable. Well, probably not the s’mores pie part but The Baby-sitters Club part. This book series is, after all, the main reason I started blogging about making pies.

S’mores are an American camping snack, and a treat I have only experienced second hand. I don’t know if the first reference to s’mores I came across was in The BSC but let’s say it was. The book was a Super Special (they were the best ones!) called Baby-sitters’ Summer Vacation. It centered around the baby-sitting gang and their crazy adventures at Camp Mohawk (if you want to check out the specific s’mores reference, skip right over to page 181). Anyway, reading about people making s’mores didn’t really mean anything to me, since there was no description about what a s’more actually was. Then I saw s’mores being made in a film, (might it have been The Sandlot Kids?) and it all clicked. S’mores are all about graham crackers, chocolate and a partially melted-over-a-camp-fire marshmallow. How yum does that sound? But graham crackers aren’t really something you can find in Australian supermarkets and I hate camping. So that ended that.

Childhood went on, as did my teens and twentys (gulp) before I revisited this American treat. I was initially inspired by the guest post from the blog Confessions of a Cookbook Queen, which introduced me to the idea of making s'mores into a pie. But then thought there were one too many sweet ingredients in that particular recipe, so I headed over to allrecipes.com and found what I was looking for.

Now, the trick with this pie was finding the ingredients. They were extremely American specific and I knew Coles wouldn’t be much help. Thankfully, I am a frequenter of USA Foods (both the physical store and ordering online) so I knew I’d be able to find what I needed, specifically marshmallow fluff, graham cracker crust crumbs and chocolate pudding.

I made the pie crust out of the crumbs and popped it into the oven to cook and then the fridge to chill. Next I made the chocolate pudding, which mainly consisted of stirring the chocolate powder mixed with milk until it boiled and thickened. Time to assemble! Marshmallow fluff is a sticky bitch. My god. It was an effort to spread it over the base but we got there in the end.

Over that went the chocolate pudding and then the pie had to set.

I’m sure you can imagine just how sweet this pie was. And it’s not a keeper. You pretty much have to eat it the day you make it. But I really enjoyed putting it together because of the ingredients I was introduced to and because it made me re-read Baby-sitters’ Summer Vacation just so I could find the exact page where they mentioned making s’mores. Good times.

Next stop Apple Pie and Archie comics!

maple pecan pie and the american breakfast

Maple syrup is really tasty. I was, therefore, extremely happy to come across a pie recipe to use it in since I mainly contain my syrup use to pancakes (and oh how I love pancakes – I had my twelfth birthday party at a Pancake Parlour and my cake was the biggest pancake I had ever seen).

The recipe for Maple Pecan Pie was from the Williams-Sanoma Pie & Tart cookbook.

I made this pie for an occasion. I was having my parents over for dinner, for the first time since moving to my one-bedroom flat in 3054 over a year ago. My parents have a fondness for pecan pie (largely due to the pecan pie scene from When Harry Met Sally) so this pie was a perfect fit. I only hoped it wouldn’t be too sweet. When I saw that the recipe called for 2 cups of syrup to be reduced to around 1½ cups I knew it would be a little too much. I have found that when using American recipes, it’s best to cut back on the sugar included otherwise it’s just too sweet for my palate.

I got to work cooking the base and making the filling,which mainly consisted of syrup, pecans and brown sugar. I filled the crust shell and kept the pie on the bench until it was time to pop it into the oven (if only I had a window sill for such occasions!).

As I got the rest of the dinner ready, I started thinking about how lacking my pancakes-for-breakfast intake had been, especially when going out for brunch. I always want to order pancakes but decide it best to order an egg dish. In America, you don’t have to make such decisions. There are places you can go where both eggs and pancakes are included in the same meal. Amazing. American breakfasts are the absolute best. A few years ago, during a trip to NYC, a friend and I spent a Sunday morning walking over the Brooklyn Bridge and ended up at Bubby’s for breakfast. It was one of the best meals I’ve had. Being able to order the usual eggs and bacon with pancakes and then drizzling syrup over the whole plate is liberating. It’s not quite so accepted here. You can sometimes find French toast and bacon on a menu but I feel that we’re ready for that next step.

Back to the pie. It was a-MA-zing. I served it warm with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. My parents insisted they take the leftovers off my hands and I grudgingly obliged.




Next stop, S’mores Pie and The Baby-Sitters Club.

cherry pie and twin peaks

Cherry pie is delicious. I’ve blogged about it previously so there’s no surprise that this was going to be my first pit (pie?) stop on my pie odyssey.

When I think of cherry pie, I think of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. I watched the TV show with my mum back when it first aired in the early 90s and considering my age at the time, I’m okay admitting that I didn't understand much. All I knew what I loved how much it freaked me out.

However, I wasn’t making the pie from Twin Peaks (mainly because at the time I didn’t realise that this recipe was available), I was making the pie from Mrs. Rowe’s Little Book of Southern Pies. I made a change to the base, using crushed chocolate-covered HobNob biscuits instead of pastry (they’re seriously the second-best biscuits in the world). So I made my pie, popped it into the oven and waited.

While the pie cooked, I let thoughts of ‘she’s dead, wrapped in plastic’ swarm through my mind. I’d actually had a run in with Lynch’s characters earlier in the year when I finally read The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. I'd wanted to read this book since I watched the show but felt it was too taboo for me to purchase at the same bookstore where all my BSC titles and Pen Pal titles had been bought. And, man, that book freaked me out all over again. Laura Palmer was into some fucked up shit!

I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t the book, the initial film, or the TV show that freaked me out the most. That honour is reserved for the film prequel Fire Walk with Me. I watched it by myself one day after school, so yes, it was daylight outside, but I still had to stop the film halfway through and take deep breaths before finishing it. There were way too many Bob-hiding-in-the-corner-of-the-bedroom scenes to make me sleep properly for weeks after.

Anyway, after about an hour, my pie was ready and it was pretty yum. Although I dare say it would have gone better with a cup of that Joe that Agent Cooper always went on about. (Or even David Lynch's own brew.)




Next stop, Maple Pecan Pie and the American breakfast.

american pie (or my obsession with american life and how it made me want to bake a pie a week)

From a young age, I (like most people) was intrigued by American pop culture. During primary school, this intrigue blew into full-scale Obsession. At one stage, I could name all 50 states and got into one of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with my parents when they wouldn’t let me buy, and proudly display, an American flag. Yeah, I know.

American tv and thoughts of one day getting to travel through those 50 states kept my Obsession healthy. In year 9, a close friend and I would spend hours mapping out the road trip we would one day take from the East to West coast. Those planning days are still fond memories for me.

But if I had to pick a starting point for my American Obsession, it was when I read my first Baby-Sitters Club book, Kristy’s Big Idea. Now, I know I’m not the first to walk down the nostalgic BSC path, many blogs have done so, so I’ll quickly move on to say that while BSC was an important part of my pre-teen years, I expanded my reading list to include any series that gave me the snap shot of American life that I so wanted to be my reality. Of course, as high school, boys, parties, BFFs and such entered my life, there was little room left for my Obsession…until now.

I’ve decided to channel my Obsession into one symbol that really sums up what that fantasy world offered. Comfort. Familiarity. Fun. Deliciousness. (Okay, not that last one). That symbol? The pie! And so begins my pie-a-week odyssey. Why not join me?