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Today, July 5th, was proclaimed Pie Party Day by some creative foodie in cyberworld. The idea was to bake a pie, take a picture, and then post it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, somehow on the internet. Across the globe, over 1400 people signed up to participate.
Now in the hierarchy of desserts, pie is high on the list. Basically my list goes: cream desserts (creme brulee, panna cotta, cream puffs), pie, cheesecake, brownies, cupcakes, cake, cookies, frozen desserts. Yes, I place pie above cake. And when it comes to the pie hierarchy, I place cream pies first before fruit filled. I prefer berries and dislike apple. This dessert hierarchy is important to me and I used to get upset that my ex-husband didn't know that. I mean, I knew what flavors of ice cream to buy and what foods he liked, so why couldn't he ever get it right when he went to the store to get dessert? After 10 years together you'd think he'd know my preferences.
Back to the point, I will get a piece of banana cream pie before I get a slice of chocolate cake. So when the Pie Party came up on Facebook, I was in and forwarded the invite to anybody else I could think of who would also be interested.
Then it was a matter of what pie to make. I live alone and as much as I love dessert, it's not a good thing for me to have an entire pie or cake sitting around my house because I WILL eat it. Then I remembered something I had stumbled upon while internet surfing - pie in a jar. Here was the perfect solution! Pie in single servings that could easily be frozen and baked later, as needed. Everything is the same except that the vessels you are using are the squat half pint canning jars. It took me a bit to hunt them down, but I finally found a case of them at Raley's.
I used Dorie Greenspan's Sweet Pastry Dough from her Baking: From My Home to Yours. Then I just made a simple combo of blueberries that I picked on Saturday and some nectarines.
Roll your pastry dough and cut it into pieces that you fit together in the jar. Since we were suffering 100 degree days, I had placed the dough and the jars in the refrigerator to keep cool and worked in shifts with a clump of dough and a jar at a time. Then quickly back into the frig. I managed to get five pie jars done with the dough recipe, which is usually for a 9" pie.
The result? Single serving pies, two which I baked for photo purposes and three that are in the freezer for future sweet treats. As a person who wants a dessert once in a while without having whole cakes and pies lying around, this is a perfect solution.
