Pumpkin Pie with Gingersnap Crust

Every year, I bake a pumpkin pie for my family's Thanksgiving Dinner. In my world, it's not really Thanksgiving unless you have pumpkin pie. I often experiment with the type of pie I make, and this year, I decided to make a pumpkin pie with a gingersnap crust. I absolutely love ginger, and I think pumpkin and ginger taste great together.

I used Martha Stewart's pumpkin pie recipe. I also modified a recipe that I found for a graham cracker crust, but I substituted gingersnaps instead of the graham crackers. I guessed that they would be interchangeable, and based on my results, I think this substitution worked wonderfully.

Gingersnap Crust

Ingredients:

5 oz. gingersnaps, crushed (I prefer the Triple Gingersnaps from Trader Joe's or the 365 brand from Whole Foods. Both have great ginger flavor.)
5 TBSP melted butter
3 TBSP sugar

Directions:

Pulse the gingersnaps in the bowl of a food processor until they resemble coarse crumbs.

Add the butter and sugar, and pulse until the mixture becomes clumpy and starts to stick together.

Using a rubber spatula, spread the gingersnap mixture evenly over the bottom and sides of a 9-inch pie plate. Bake at 350 degrees until edges of crust turn golden brown, 12 to 14 minutes.

Now we move on to the pie filling. Pumpkin pie is incredibly easy, because you mix all of the ingredients together in one bowl. Whisk until smooth.

Pour the filling into your crust, make sure it's spread out evenly, and then bake. Voila! Pumpkin pie!

For some reason, my photos of this pie didn't turn out very well, but I promise it's delicious! The pie filling is a fairly traditional one, but the addition of the gingersnap crust gave it a nice kick of flavor. This is a great recipe if you want a traditional pie with a slight twist.

Peach-Raspberry Pie

It's late September, which is the very end of peach season around here. I found myself with a wonderful abundance of late-summer peaches, and I wanted to use them in a dessert. I flipped through Martha's Baking Handbook, but she only had a few recipes which featured peaches. I was inspired by her recipe for Peach, Apricot, and Cherry Pie. I didn't have apricots or cherries on hand, but I know apricots are members of the peach family, so I thought it would be fine to substitute extra peaches for the apricots in the recipe. Several of Martha's recipes encourage bakers to substitute different berries for each other, so I decided to use raspberries (which I had in my freezer) instead of cherries.

If you're playing at home, here's a recipe for Peach-Raspberry Pie from Martha's web site.

I've never made peach pie before, but I thought it was interesting that this recipe called for unpeeled peaches. I'm used to peeling fruit before baking with it. But who am I to question Martha? If she wants sliced, unpeeled peaches, then that's what I'll use.



I defrosted my frozen raspberries and drained off most of their liquid, because I didn't want a soggy pie. I added the raspberries, as well as all of the other ingredients of the pie filling, to the peaches.


The filling still seemed very liquidy, but I wasn't sure if I should remove more of the liquid before adding the filling to the pie crust. I ended up draining about half of the liquid, but in retrospect, I probably should have removed even more. Martha's instructions were to keep the fruit juices in the filling, but I think the fact that I used frozen raspberries changed things.

Next, I added the filling to the bottom of the pie crust, and I dotted the top of the pie with small pieces of chilled butter.



See how much liquid was in there? Alarm bells were going off in my mind, but since I'd already filled the crust, I didn't think there was much I could do at that point.

Finally, I topped the pie with my lattice crust and sprinkled (raw) turbinado sugar over the top for some extra crunch and texture.



After an hour in the oven, I had a freshly baked pie!



As you can see, the crust could not fully contain the fruit juices, so they started to spill over the top. This wasn't a huge problem, except that it made the pie a little messy, and the bottom crust had less structure than I would have liked.

But the flavor... oh, the flavor of the pie was incredible! The peaches were ripe and full of flavor. The raspberries added just a hint of tartness. The crust was delicate, flaky, and oh-so-buttery. I had to control myself from eating half of the pie in one sitting. This one is definitely a keeper.

Pate Brisee (pie dough)

I've baked a lot of pies, but I'm not sure if I've ever made a flaky, butter pie crust from scratch. I usually make my own graham cracker or cookie crusts, but I feel like those are much simpler. When I need a "real" pie crust, I usually buy a frozen or otherwise pre-made one from the grocery store. They're incredibly easy, and I always thought they tasted good. I didn't think it was worth the hassle to make my own crust from scratch. Well, all of that is about to change.

I decided it's time for me to make my first homemade double-pie-crust. And not just any pie crust, but one with a lattice top! Woohoo, I'm pulling out the big guns, now!

As usual, I used the recipe from Martha's Baking Handbook, but here is her recipe for pate brisee on her web site (there are some slight differences between the two versions).

It all started with some simple ingredients - flour, butter, and water in the food processor.


After I mixed in the water, the dough started to look like... well, dough. I separated the dough into two equal(ish) halves, and then wrapped it in plastic and put it in the fridge to chill.

After the dough was chilled, it was time to roll it out to a large circle that would fit over the bottom and sides of my 9-inch pie plate. This is where things started to get tricky.

So, I have this nice, flat, very thin piece of dough. Now how the heck do I get it onto my pie plate in one piece, without smooshing or tearing it?

I'll wrap it back around my rolling pin, and then attempt to unroll it again over my pie plate. Voila! (It took me two attempts to do this, by the way.)

Look how well it fits! I trimmed the overhang to about one-half inch, maybe a smidge longer.

Now I had to figure out what to do with the top of the pie crust. I wanted to make a lattice-top, which looks kind of like a basket weave. I took my second ball of dough out of the fridge, rolled it out, and cut it into 1-inch strips. Then I practiced weaving them together on parchment paper, before I transferred everything to the actual pie. It wasn't difficult, once I got the hang of it.

Martha's Baking book recommends that novice bakers weave the lattice top on parchment paper, then refrigerate the dough until it gets hard, so you can transfer the entire lattice top onto the pie in one fell swoop. I tried to do that. It didn't work. The lattice was too large and unstable to move by itself, and it was too difficult to use the rolling pin trick. So I had to undo the entire thing and re-weave it over the top of the pie. It was kind of a pain, but I knew what to do the second time around, so it only took me a few minutes.

This is what the pie looked like (before baking) with both crusts in place. The brown stuff on top is raw turbinado sugar. The rest of the pie recipe will be in my next post!