#30 - It’s raining, it’s pouring

It’s perfect weather for an apple pie. The Elly-monster spent this evening at his grandparents house. A perfect opportunity for me to flex some atrophied cooking muscles. Boy this one was fun, and totally worth the hours and mess it caused. I could almost hear my dad saying to me, as he was wont to do, “did you use every bloody dish in the kitchen?” Why yes, dad, I did!

#30 - bake an apple pie from scratch and make vanilla icecream to go with it is done.

I used Poh’s recipe with only a few minor changes. I peeled a lemon and added the rind to the apple mixture to increase the sour/sweet contrast. Used all butter instead of copha in the pastry. The apple seemed to be taking ages to cook and all the tasty caramel sauce kept clumping on the pan, so I added in some extra water then strained most of the sauce from the apple filling before putting it in the pastry. I’d ummed and erred about including the cheddar cheese in the pastry, but my it was lovely. I bought a vintage cheddar, and it adds something really different to this pie. It makes the pastry really savoury, but also seems to create an extra crispiness and flaky bite to the edges. And the savoury/sour/sweet pie combined perfectly with my obscenely rich vanilla icecream.

I used this recipe from David Lebovitz. I accepted his invitation to add an extra three egg yolks to make a total of eight yolks. Mmm, yolky goodness! I couldn’t find the instructions for my icecream maker, so had to wing it. It seemed to take about as long as I remembered, but the result was a little bit runnier than it should have been, although still very very tasty. Seriously, I could eat this icecream until the cows come home. Mooooo!

And on that note, the rest is best in pictures: