Cherry

I actually made this pie last Friday... it's just taken me a little while to get around to blogging about it. Now as a preface I would like to say that before last Friday I had never eaten, let alone baked, a cherry pie. I have decided that I LOVE cherry pie. It was SOOOO good. Enough of that. On to the pie!

On Friday everything went as planned. During lunch/ELI time I hurried home and made up my wonderful pie crusts. I would have tried out that over-processing method but our food processor was broken so that wasn't really an option. Instead I just did my crusts by hand. (I was very careful to keep my butter pea sized.) I then simply flattened them into two lovely discs and stuck them into the refrigerator. (Gotta keep that butter cold.) This time there would be no problem with rolling out pie shells before putting them in the refrigerator. I've learned my lesson. So here are my two lovely pie dough discs:

Lovely right? Anywho. After school I hurried home and got right to work on the filling. Cherry pie filling is quite simple. All that you need are pie cherries, some cherry juice, sugar, cornstarch, salt, and vanilla extract. You mix the solid ingredients together and then sprinkle that over the cherries and cherry juice and toss to distribute it all evenly. So it goes from this:

To this: (I'm moving so fast I'm just a blur... is that cool or what)

And then finally to this:

It looks much more appetizing after it's baked... Well then I went ahead and got to rolling out my dough, placing it in the pan, trimming the edges, and adding the filling. And this time I remembered the BUTTER!!!

Starting to look more appealing right? Well we haven't even gotten to the cool part yet. Now we're at the cool part... For this pie I got to do a lattice top. Lattice tops are AWESOME. It's REALLY simple too. First step, roll out the dough and cut it into 16 strips:

Check! Step two, lay out eight of the strips horizontally across the pie:

Yupp. Step three, weave the other eight strips through the original eight at a slight angle... There's a whole process to that but I'll just skip to the end where the lattice was all nicely woven:

Pretty cool right? Well it gets better. In addition to this lovely lattice I learned a new way to crimp the edges of my pie! It involves... a spoon. (So much cooler than a fork.)

Pretty awesome, I know. Well then the pie goes into the oven and and hour later (magically) it comes out looking like this:

I know what you're thinking and yes, it did taste as good as it looks. For never having made a cherry pie before I was VERY proud of myself. Now this is not to say that I did not make some mistakes along the way. Once again I believe that this pie was slightly under-baked. The top crust was perfect but there was this very Very VERY thin layer on the bottom crust that was a bit doughy. Another five minutes and it would have been perfect. I think I also might have over-handled the dough when trying to roll it out. It was flaky, but starting to edge on the crumbly side of things. Even so, I'm getting closer to that perfect crust!

Now before I sign off for this pie I have to thank a very special helper. You might have noticed that my hands were actually in a few of these pictures (or at least two of them... and then there was one picture with my elbow in the corner, oops). This is because I was not taking these pictures. SURPRISE!!! I had a helper who goes by the name Best Friend Ever (though some people call her BreAnne Huber) taking pictures for me. A special round of applause for my photographer! (She's also the one who taught me the trick with using a spoon to do that cool edge. Yeah, she's amazing.) I think that's it for this pie... I LOVE cherry pie...