Cranberry Chess

What do you think when you hear "cranberry?"  Personally it brings to mind thread strung with popcorn and cranberries being wrapped around the Christmas tree.  (A bit old fashioned I know, but sometimes the old traditions are the best ones!)  Now what do you think when you hear "Cranberry Chess Pie?"  I know what my response is: "Huh?"  In my mind cranberries belonged on the tree, not in a pie.  Cranraisins were edible... cranberries, not so much.  Boy was I wrong.  Cranberry Chess Pie is an interesting mixture of the tart cranberries with a very sweet filling around them.  Some people loved it, my mom wouldn't even try it, and I... enjoyed it.

In addition to trying a pie that was entirely foreign to me (I mean have you ever heard of Cranberry Chess Pie?) I decided to try out a new crust recipe as well.  This recipe has cream cheese in it instead of water and apparently just about the flakiest crust in the world... Right.

The recipe is simple.  You mix your flour sugar and salt, then you take that mixture and your butter... and instead of going to the food processor you take it to the mixer.  So you've got flour, sugar, salt, and butter in a mixer...

Well that's exciting... Now what?  How about some cream cheese?

Okay.  And then you mix and mix and mix until... Tada!

You have... this.  Now the recipe wasn't really specific as to how long you're supposed to mix the dough for; and if there's one thing I've learned while making crust it is DON'T OVER PROCESS YOUR DOUGH!  So this is where I stopped mixing...  Bad idea.  It might not be easy to see from that picture, but I had a LOT of butter and cream cheese pockets throughout this dough.  While butter pockets are typically a great thing when it comes to pies... Apparently that doesn't hold true for this one.  I made my dough ball, I rolled it out, it stuck to the counter.  I tried again (working it in my hands a little bit first to try to get the cream cheese pockets to go away) and this time I managed to get it into my pan... when this happened:

I had rips like this all over.  I had no choice but to try to roll it out again.  Well, third time's a charm.  At this point I had really worked all of the butter and cream cheese pockets into the dough and so I managed to roll it out and get it safely into the pan.  With it in the pan I went ahead and did my chessboard edge.  I think it turned out pretty nicely.  (Even if I do say so for myself.)

For this pie the crust needed to be partially baked, so I stuck it in the oven and got to work on the filling.

The filling for a Cranberry Chess Pie is really quite interesting.  First you have sugar, melted butter, and a touch of salt.

You get that all mixed and lovely and then add some eggs (mixing after each addition), flour, buttermilk, vinegar, orange zest, and the cranberries.  In the end you have this lovely... filling, I guess.

It just looks kind of odd...  There's nothing wrong with it or anything, I just didn't expect it to look like that.  My pie crust was out of the oven and all partially baked... Though to be honest I think I left it in a bit longer than I ought to have so perhaps fully-baked is closer to the truth.

So, my crust was ready, my filling was ready, I was ready... But it turns out my oven just wasn't ready.  After partially baking my crust for me it simply refused to go to the desired temperature and then it refused to work at all.  I had no choice but to cover my crust and my filling and wait until morning to see if I could bake it then.  Fortunately by morning the oven had decided to like me again.  When I put the pie in the oven it looked like this...

And came out like this...

The magic of baking something will never cease to amaze me.  The pie was delicious, and I decided that maybe cranberries were edible after all.  The crust... well that didn't impress me quite so much.  Because I had under-midxed it and then over-handled it the crust really wasn't that flakey at all.  This happened to be a big disappointment because I had been looking forwards to SUPER flakiness.  In addition to this the cream cheese gave the crust an entirely different taste than my normal crust.  It wasn't a bad taste, most people really liked it, but it wasn't what I was used to.  In the end I've decided that I'm better off just using my normal recipe.  I'll leave the SUPER flakey crusts to someone more adventurous than me.