Year of Pie was a project from early 2018 through mid-2019, where I baked a new pie almost every week for a over year. In the end, the project goal changed from one a week, to simply a total of fifty-two. Add in pies baked for birthdays, parties, events, it wound up being easily north of sixty in about as many weeks. A more organized blogger would’ve counted the pounds of butter, bags of flour, number of eggs, but this was never been that sort of project.
The idea was to improve my pie skills—demystify pie dough, decent meringue, and bake pies I’d never had.
Pie dough? Check. I can make it in my sleep. I settled into a solid dough, flexible enough for most fillings, with the same flakiness, same butter to lard/crisco ratio.
Meringue? A late comer, but check. That skill clicked toward the end. It involved practice, practice, and practice. Practice while changing one variable at a time. Routine searches for tricks and techniques paid off eventually, and I now have a stable, reliable meringue method.
Different pies? Oh yeah. Big Check. I remade a few pies over the year, but almost every week brought a new pie or new version. Some failed and are sitting in a drafts file—I’m looking at you upside down peach pie. Others, like the sugar cream and the Mississippi mud pie were good but could be better.
And now? Slowly rebuilding the site on a more flexible platform, and thinking about where to go next. Perhaps, obscure pies?