Annnnnd… we’re back! Sorry for the delay. We’ve all been reading the latest book and I think most of us have finished it, but we’re also really busy, so excuse us. But here I am with a new recipe and Jeanine posted that fantastic three layer carrot cake so hopefully we’re back on a roll. With butter. Haha. Get it? *ahem*

Anyway I loved this book. I have to say, as much as I have a dislike for Sandra Bullock as an actress, her sister seems much more like someone I could hang out with. Anyone who quits a 9 to 5 bullshit executive job in L.A. to open up a bakery gets a A in my book. I can totally relate to that dream. I get so bored in an office setting, office politics are usually no better than high school crap. But it’s not a reality for everyone, unfortunately. So I do envy her. Plus, she’s got a much cooler name: Gesine. They lived in Germany for a while as children, which also intrigued me. I’m part German, a large part, and I’ve always been curious as to what living there would be like. The idea of 3′ o clock tea and cake is totally up my alley. Sign me up! I also agree with her view on people who are anti-sweets, etc. One cupcake a week doesn’t make you fat, neither does a slice of cake every day. It’s the 7,000 other things you cram in your mouth that do the trick.

So anyway I do not like pie. Or berries. But I ended up going to the fruit market the other day and bought tons of fresh berries- raspberries & blackberries. My mother loves them, and she loves them in pie even more. And Mother’s Day is coming… so I had Gesine’s pie filling recipe in my head and decided to make it.

Raspberry & blackberry pie filling

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 cups raspberries (I used half raspberries, half blackberries)
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
butter (optional)

Directions:

1. Whisk sugar, cornstarch and salt in a medium bowl to blend.
2. Stir in the raspberries and lemon juice. Add filling to crust.

Quick puff pastry

Ingredients:

4 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 pounds butter (5 sticks)
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon lemon juice stirred into 3/4 cup cold water

Directions:

1. Place the flour in a large bowl. Cut the butter into 1-inch pieces. Add to the flour and incorporate with your hands, pinching and massaging the butter into the flour, making sure to leave discernable chunks of butter intact. You don’t want to incorporate the butter so well that it starts to look like cornmeal.
2. Dissolve the salt gently into the water. Add the flour and butter mixture and gently mix with your hands until the dough starts to come together slightly.
3. Shape the dough into a rough square and let it rest for 10 minutes. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into a 1/2-inch-thick rectangle. Give the dough three single turns, followed by one double turn. If the dough feels rubbery after you have completed a few turns, let it rest a few minutes before you continue.
4. Cover and refrigerate. Your dough block should be approx. 12 x 6 inches.
5. Once your pastry is nice and cool, take a sharp knife and cut it in half, take a look at where you’ve sliced through. You should see chunks of butter, this is a wonderful thing. when you roll, you want to press down on these layers. You don’t want to lay the cut side down, you want to make sure the layers are parallel to each other and to the table, and that you are rolling the layers onto one another, maintaining the layer structure and ensuring maximum puff and flakiness.

And now we get to the assembly. First I preheated my oven to 350 F. Then I rolled the dough into circles, and then pressed one into my pie pan. I froze it for a half hour, removed them and poked holes in the bottom of them with a fork. Then I lined it with parchment (foil and can be used as well) and fill that with dry beans or rice to weigh it down. I baked them for 15 minutes, until they were no longer raw. According to Gesine, this is a “blind bake”, ensuring that the bottom pastry won’t turn out soggy.

This is probably where I should say I’m not very good with crusts. Cheesecake crust and pie crusts are my waterloo. It probably also added to that that I decided to make this on the hottest day of our spring so far, about 80 degrees and rising. But it turned out okay for my first pie. I’m planning on trying this again, for sure. Was it perfect? No. But tasted amazing, well at least according to the people I served it to. Okay carrying on with the recipe…

Then I beat one egg with 1 tablespoon water to make an egg wash.  I removed the parchment and rice from the shells and brushed the crusts with the egg wash. Then I filled them with raspberry/blackberry filling, topping it with some little pats of butter. I baked them for an additional 45 minutes, until the crust was golden and the filling was bubbling. If you’d like, you could use the second circle of dough as a cover for your pie. I opted to not do this, I wanted to see those little berries squirming in sugary goodness.

The filling was obviously easy. The dough… eh. Not difficult, just time consuming, and since it was warm it was mushy and the butter was melty. And my filling was a bit runny. But hey, whatever. A pie is a pie. Stuff it in your face and move along.

Some comments I got on it:

“Out of this world.. the berries, the crust, everything!”

“Two thumbs up. Fantastic.”

“Can I have another slice?”