So on Sunday, I decided to delve into the secret arts of baking Apple Pie. I didn’t expect this to be difficult in the least, so I even took the plunge to try to make 2 of them. Oh boy, did I fail epically. Let’s see how and where I went wrong!
So the first part of the process? Of course, since this was my first time making apple pie, I went to look up a recipe (By the way, this is my friend’s macbook, not mine). Allrecipes.com provided me with a relatively fool-proof one:
- 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- 1/3 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 7 1/2 cups peeled, cored and sliced apples
- 1 cup raisins
- 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
- 1 egg
So I omitted the raisins. I don’t think that screwed me up too much though.
Went to the store, bought all the ingredients, and 16 apples; 8 granny smith and 8 red delicious. I had no idea how many apples to get for a pie, so my friend and I asked some random lady in the store. She said about 8-9 apples per pie. Oh boy – mistake #1 right there.
So I went through the painstaking process of peeling and slicing the apples up. So you can see the apple pieces floating in a pot of water right now. Something I picked up off lifehacker is that if you leave apples in water right after cutting them, it prevents them from turning brown. Since it was going to take a long time for me to cut up all of the apples, I decided to implement this trick. This could have been mistake #2.
And now comes the mixing! Basically you just have sugar, sugar, flour, cinnamon, some lemon juice, the apples, and sugar. You mix it all up together so the apples are coated, and bam!
This is a lonely pie crust waiting to be filled…
and this is a bulging pie crust with too many apples inside. I could NOT fit 8 apples into this pie. I think about 6.5 got into it, and it still looked about ready to tear this pie crust up. Mistake #3: I forgot to cut slits into the top of the pie crust. Probably the biggest mistake I could have done. The next pie, I only cut up 4 more apples and used the leftover ones from this pie. This still filled the second pie up a good amount.
And so pie #1 looked like this. Eww…The crust actually wasn’t that bad though. It looked like this because the egg I used to coat the top crust was not spread evenly, so the black is just where there was too much egg.
The second pie looks much better, no? Well enough of that for now though, because the appearance was the least of my worries when I let the pies cool and decided to take a look inside.
I think a combination of putting the apples in the water and not cutting slits in the crust caused this outcome. The delicious gooey filling of the pie was instead just sugar water! And the apples themselves were not dried out the way they should have been. As a result, I conclude this apple pie making a complete failure. After refrigerating it overnight though, it doesn’t taste half bad; but as a cook – I have failed you, apple pie.
Anyway, I realize by now that most of you are snickering at me because I have failed probably the easiest pie recipe in the book, but hey – we all learn from out mistakes, right? I plan on re-attempting this apple pie again very soon and I hope for much better results. Until next time!
