Pies, Tarts, Cake Balls and Chocolate

May 21, 2009

Not necessarily in the order of the post title, but it’s been a seriously busy month! Knitting is not progressing fast enough to note, but the kitchen…oh the kitchen is buzzing!

My last post was just before Easter, and that weekend at the Stitch n Bitch, I made Chocolate Nests and Chocolate Mint Grasshopper Pie. The following week I made Strawberry Vanilla Pie, followed by Strawberry Mango Tarts, Banana Cream Pie and then last night Pineapple Pie. My Stitch n Bitch ladies (and Andrew) helped make about 200 Cake Balls for wee one #3′s baptism on the long weekend.

The chocolate nests were really, really painfully cute. The kids loved them, but so did everyone else. They tasted much better than I figured Shredded Wheat and honey would taste, even with chocolate. I pressed the mixture into a silicone mini tart tray and let it set in the fridge, of course I had to use Cadbury mini eggs in them!

Grasshopper Pie … This crust is Oreo cookie crumbs and melted Becel, next time I’ll try adding coconut to it. I didn’t make it exactly as the recipe, I didn’t use the Mint Oreos (instead used regular Oreos and a bit of mint extract), and I used vanilla pudding with green food colouring instead of pistachio.

I started making my own vanilla custard in March for fruit topped pies, and I’ve pretty much got it down now as I sometimes make it for the kids as well. But when I made this pie, I burnt two batches before I finally cooked one properly. Bad custard mojo? The last batch turned out perfect. Since I’m doing a different pie every week, I couldn’t just make this a repeat of Daphne’s Welcome to the World Pie, so I used graham cracker crust instead of Oreo cookie crust. Gill has a strange love of winding yarn, which naturally makes us knitters very happy. Here she’s wound the second ball of my snazzy Greek cotton for my mother in law’s socks!

I had been making a lot of these crumb + melted Becel crusts lately because they’re soooo good and so easy to make. But in the spirit of mixing it up and getting creative I had planned to make a mango pie. Of the mangos I had on hand, 4 were not ripe enough leaving me with only 1. I did however have strawberries that I just added in place of the rest of the mango pieces and made a tray of Strawberry Mango Tarts. Delish! This was the same evening that we made up the kofeta for the baptism, but I’ll save those pics for the baptism post.

Banana Cream Pie has been on the list since I started making a pie a week, but I hadn’t gotten around to it till now. I used a graham cracker crust and banana custard with a layer of sliced bananas between! This was for sure one of my hands down faves so far!

I settled on a Pineapple Pie this week because I had never made or even tasted one and came across a recipe for it on All Recipes. It was good, really dense but it wasn’t heavy when we ate it. Emerald free handed a pineapple cutout!

Now, on to the really fun stuff. When I made Cake Balls for my friend Lindsay’s birthday last month, all of us loved them enough to marry them. Really, they’re so amazingly good. So of course I wanted to make some for wee one #3′s baptism on the long weekend. We ended up making even more because several of these were eaten as the night wore on.