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Tag Archives: pie-in-a-jar

On a Chilly Thursday in March

10 Saturday Apr 2021

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Apple Pie, Mini Pie, Pear Pie

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

apple, Granny Smith, pear, pie-in-a-jar

Hi friends, here’s an everyday sort of pie story for you – catching up from March here (and honestly, patting myself on the back a bit that lately my blog posts have been about fairly recent history.) It feels good to be here and writing for you so regularly.

Sometimes, circumstances collude to create just the right conditions for a batch of mini pies in jars. I’d added some Granny Smith apples to my Imperfect Foods box the week before, I had streusel topping in the freezer, and I needed a small but meaningful gift to bring over to a couple from church. (Over the last eight or nine months of Covid-era-life, our church has had a pairing list to connect families on a weekly basis. It’s been really great to have the opportunity to give and receive creative gifts and gestures when we aren’t able to see our church family as a whole on a regular basis.)

Granny Smith apples, pears, a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, lemon juice…a simple, can’t-go-wrong filling. In addition to two jars for our church friends, I made a pie for my friend Erin (it was her birthday week, hence the included candle). I also had to make a airplane pie-in-a-jar for our Matt (Uncle Teo to Pippa) who was getting ready to go back to his hometown of KC after a few months of writing his dissertation from our dining room table. And, of course, I made one in a ramekin for Pippa Pip, who helped me make the pastry and thinks there’s hardly anything better than homemade apple pie.

After a morning of pie-making, Pippa and I met up with Erin and her daughter Emery for a girls’ sushi lunch. I love that these two sweet girls are good buddies despite being many years apart in age. (Click the link to see the last photo I posted of Emery on this blog. Boy oh boy. To continue the Head and the Heart quote I started in that post from 2014, the months turn into years!)

This churashi bowl was gorgeous! Eating in a parking lot isn’t always the most picturesque, and we had a chilly day for it, but you’ll never catch me complaining about anything our restaurants have had to do to stay open this year. The food service world has been on my heart constantly.

Pippa can eat a lot – but not THAT much fried rice. (She’s enjoying it, despite the quizzical look on her face.) I hope she takes after her friend Emery’s love of sriracha and all things spicy someday.

It was a happy birthday celebration for a dear friend!

Have a wonderful weekend! ❤

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The More, the Merrier

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Apple Pie, Pear Pie

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Christmas, collaboration, five-spice, holiday, pie-in-a-jar, Thanksgiving

Good morning my friends,

I am honored to have been recently featured on my friend Jolie’s blog, The Forgetful Files. Jolie is a freelance writer (currently working on a novel), a mom of five, and generally amazing human being. I highly recommend checking her blog out if you enjoy tales of real life family adventures (and foibles, as Jolie puts it!)

This weekend I’ll be baking up some Five Spice Pear-Apple Pies in Jars, and one will be heading towards Mark Ishman from Texas, whose little rhyming ditty of a comment on Jolie’s post Pie Giveaway Time made him a winner! (Check out all the comments on this post, there are several poetic gems present.) For the recipe, read the Sweet As Pie Winner follow up post.

Since my sleeves will be rolled up to bake and I’ll be braving the post office during Holiday season ANYWAY, I’ve decided: The More, the Merrier. Here’s another chance to win a Pie-in-a-Jar! Any comments left on this post before Friday (December 13th) at 9 pm PST/12 am EST will be put into a vessel (likely a pie jar) and a name drawn at random…for winner #2!

For fun…in your comment, will you please tell me either 1) your favorite pie 2) a pie you baked or ate for Thanksgiving 3) a pie you plan to bake or eat this holiday season (presumed Five Spice Pear-Apple Pie excluded ;)) 

Here’s a picture of the fourth pie – the apple pie – that my family ate this Thanksgiving week (is it cheating that my mom made it, not me?)

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I look forward to hearing from you and selecting a second Pie-in-a-Jar Giveaway Winner!

Happy Holidays, be easy on yourself, and get enough rest! ❤

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Strawberry Peach I-Love-You Pie

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Original Pies, Summer Fruit Pie

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

mini pies, peach, pie-in-a-jar, Republic of Pie, strawberry

Within the last year, I have reached some sort of higher pie-making level. (What the official levels of pie-making are I am not quite sure…) I haven’t been a novice for a while, and now I’m fully at the point of comfort to where if you put me on Chopped and told me to come up with a dessert given the ingredients on hand my mind would immediately start trying to figure out how I could throw together a pie.

Of course, I’d need longer than thirty minutes and I would hope that my ingredients didn’t consist of some bizarre combination (green apple jellybeans, liverwurst, rice flour, and brazil nuts would be hard to make a pie out of) but you get the point. I don’t need recipes anymore. I still love to follow them sometimes and I’ll continue until I finish every dang pie in Ken’s cookbook but it is so tempting these days to throw recipes to the wind. Maybe what I’ve reached is the Freestyle Level.

One pie I’ve made in some form or another over and over this year is Strawberry Peach. The first time I used a splash of Trader Joe’s Dixie Peach juice to give it extra peachiness…if I happen to have very flavorful 100% fruit juices in my fridge, I like adding them to my pies. If you start to develop this habit though, make sure you’re using enough cornstarch. In a pie with strawberries (notorious for making pie bubble over) and a splash of extra juice, you’ll want to use an extra spoonful of starch (I’d say 4 level tablespoons went into this filling.)

IMG_2905Several batches of Strawberry Peaches minis were made during this spring and summer, some destined for local friends as gifts for a variety of occasions, some destined for farther places, like Nashville. When I went to Jamaica for a week, I left a few pies in the freezer, for Levi (I-love-you) and visiting friends I was barely able to cross paths with before leaving town. (In fact, the extent of our visit was a stop at Republic of Pie in between picking them up at one airport and dropping me off at another. Boo.) Pro tip: It’s good to have mini pies on hand. I have yet to meet someone who isn’t happy when you give them their own personal jar of pie. I mean, really.

IMG_2912One of my favorite pie memories of this summer is baking three of them (two Strawberry Peach and a blueberry) for the Onesimus crew on a hot July afternoon and serving them outside that same humid night, listening to a smoky bonfire devotion, surrounded by blinking fireflies. It was definitely an Elisha and the Widow’s Oil situation, when hungry souls kept coming and coming with plates held out eagerly for a slice, and when there was not one plate left, the pie stopped flowing. (Well, I guess at that point the one last piece flowed onto my plate. And then it was really and truly gone. And then I think some of the boys scraped the empty plates clean of any final crumbs or juicy drips.)

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IMG_4192I made the Strawberry Peach (and maybe some apple too?) pie below in July late at night after work, waiting for some awesome house guests (and Levi) to get back from a baseball game they’d gone to. It was unplanned; the ingredients were sitting around and I had just a little time and the impulse struck, cause I’m on that Freestyle Level now, you know. And I’m finding out more and more that what it means when I make you pie is that I love you. I might not put the pie in a jar with a cute little handwritten label that says “Strawberry Peach I-love-you Pie,” (that honor is reserved mostly for Levi, I suppose) but it doesn’t mean that every pie I make doesn’t actually have “I-love-you” tacked into the name secretly. Because really, it does. It is my way of showing that I care.

In one note I got in response to a couple Strawberry-Peach pies I mailed was the sentence “Thank you for loving us all the way from California” and I thought, yes! That is what I’m doing, even when I don’t know I’m doing it. If I try to feed you pie, what I am basically doing is clumsily saying “I love you.”

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Oh, Obi. Yes, I love you too, because I let you eat the pastry scraps that always fall off the dining room table when I roll out a crust.

Thanks for reading, and for eating, and for accepting my love in the form of pie.

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Pies, Pies, and More Pies

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Apple Pie, Berry Pie, Mini Pie, Mixed Fruit Pie, Original Pies

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

apple, blueberry, Christmas, ginger, honey, pear, pie-in-a-jar, raspberry, travel

It’s March already? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Let’s get down to business. First of all, I would like to announce that the Five-Spice Pear-Apple pies I mailed out during Thanksgiving week made it safely to their destinations.

timIronically, I’m pretty sure that standard mail to Australia is faster than priority mail to Georgia, Illinois, or Virginia. What in tarnation?! Lesson: The United States Postal System is an abject failure.

Eric Lange, my official domestic tester in Virginia, sent me this lovely ditty after receiving and consuming the pie:

“O Apple-Pear 5 Spice

You are so good and nice

You make my taste buds sing

You are the greatest thing!

A brown box in the mail

Delivered, without fail

A complete, delish pie

I was one lucky guy!”

Eric, you are the greatest thing.

eric pie

Following that mini-pie episode, I embarked on another of epic proportions before Christmas, making about 30 pies to give as holiday gifts to the wonderful and devoted teachers I work with and some of my faraway family in New Jersey and Georgia.

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Just one of the fillings I used was a recipe from Ken Haedrich’s book: All-Pear Pie with Maple and Candied Ginger. I’d been meaning to try this pie for so long (it’s one of my cousin Carly’s favorites, and she gave me the cookbook so she ought know). Funny thing is, I didn’t gift myself one of these pies, so I’ll be no doubt re-doing this recipe so I can actually have some. (I did have one bite of a friend’s, to be fair. But it wasn’t enough.)

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The next two fillings were my own made-up combinations. Here’s the Cran-Apple Spice; I love how beautiful the fresh cranberries are and the sourness they bring to the table. I choose sour flavors over sweet every time and I have to say that I thought this pie was a win-win combination of both.

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And here is the Honey-Apple-Raspberry filling, looking like a bit of a mess. But yum.

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Mini-pie manufacturing is no piddling job. By the time you make multiple batches of crust, a few fillings, crumbs for the topping, labels for the tops…you’re looking at a long night.

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The three pies below traveled not by car, not by mail, but by carry-on. This conversation happened.

TSA agent: I’m going to have to re-run your bag, miss.

Me in my head: Crap.

TSA agent: What are these?

Me: They’re pies….in jars.

TSA agent: Pies in jars?? That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!! (Calls other TSA agents to marvel over the coolness that is pie-in-a-jar.)

TSA agent: I think I’m going to have to keep one of these…*laughs*

Me: I’ll make an extra one just for you next time I come through *smiles*

Would this have happened at any other time besides Christmas? Doubtful. But I loved it.

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While we’re on the subject of mini pies (which, as it turns out, is more often then not…) for the third year in a row, I had the opportunity to contribute pie to a bake sale supporting my students. (Last year I sent this batch of minis…the year before I had not yet perfected the art of sending pie traveling and sent two whole pies to be sliced and sold.)

I made another Honey-Apple-Raspberry filling (since they had been pretty popular the last time ’round) and a Blueberry-Pear filling with cardamom and maple syrup, both my own recipes. I think I have figured out a pretty exact ratio for mini pie filling; the amount of filling that would fit into one largish normal pie fits roughly into nine jars. Okay, perhaps “exact” isn’t the right word, but it’s a helpful rule to follow. So the filling below made 18 mini pies. And the filling overflowed, so I really could have done 19, or 20.

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This was the first year I was able to see the bake sale in person (and I forgot to take any pictures, wouldn’t you know!) By the time I got there, the sale had been going on for perhaps two hours and most of my pies were already gone. I hope they were thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks so much to those who bought them or supported the Palm Springs bake sale in any other fashion. Over $1600 was raised for the Christadelphian Heritage School!

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll leave you with a reminder…PI DAY IS NEXT FRIDAY!

122 - i math math-jokes pi

Let me know if you’re planning on celebrating.

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Small Packages

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Berry Pie, Mini Pie

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

berry, mini pies, orange, pie-in-a-jar

Okay. Get ready. There’s a lot going on in this post.

Main topic is: Mini Pies. Pies-in-Jars. Back in March, I did this post where I talked about how I’d recently fallen in love with the concept of pies in jars and had made some for a bake sale and they were fabulous and adorable. I told you all to leave comments and I would randomly choose a few to ship pies to. Then, back in April, I announced who those lucky few would be. 

So I made them. I made these mini pies. The last time I made Pies-in-Jars, I made up the recipes. Not this time. This time I used Ken Haedrich’s Orange-Berry Pie recipe. (I have to say, I’ve gotten into a terrible habit this summer. Once I realized that I could make pretty great fruit pies without following recipes, I started getting creative all over the place. You can imagine that this does absolutely no good in helping me towards my goal of baking all 300 pies in Ken’s book.) Never fear. I went back to my book on this one.  I just slightly altered it by turning it into multiple little pies- one destined for Thamar, one destined for Eric, and one destined for Jen.

IMG_0997I used a regular pastry crust, which I slightly rolled out and then basically pressed it into the bottom and up the sides of the jar.

Holes: they happen. It’s no biggie. Just patch them up with your fingers.

IMG_0998Before I started making these pies, I found out a bit of an ironic situation had come up. My international tester (Jen) was heading to the USA for the summer, while my domestic tester (Eric) was heading to Brazil. I’m told the postal system in Brazil is kind of a joke. I knew I’d be away for most of the summer myself, so I went ahead and made the pies, planning on freezing Jen and Eric’s unbaked.

IMG_0999IMG_1001Putting a crumb topping on Pies-in-Jars is great because there ends up being a high crust to filling ratio in the jar situation. So it’s nice to have something besides more crust on top.

IMG_1002These three got baked right away, while the other two aforementioned went straight to the freezer to await the return of their owners to their respective places in the world.

IMG_1003I mentioned these labels before in my original Pie-in-a-Jar post and this time I actually used them. Shout out and thanks to LollyChops!

IMG_0996Adorbs.

IMG_1004I packaged this little friend up with some bubble wrap and a box and probably took other precautions I have forgotten about now.

This was Thamar’s email to me the following week:

Dear Jess,
More pie photos!

We were so eager to eat the pie that we forgot to take a picture of ourselves with the pie! We paired it with a local vanilla ice-cream and it was delicious!

We had lightly covered the pie with tin foil and then warmed it in the oven at 350F for 30 minutes (I had put it in the refrigerator for a day after receiving the pie). Perfect pie for two!
Thank you again for such a lovely surprise! It was just what we needed!
Love,
Thamar
SONY DSCYou are wondering how this story ends for the two pies in the freezer. Jen and Eric, you will still get pie, all being well, but it will not be those two. A few weeks ago, something tragic happened to some of my best friends. It was (and is) the type of thing that there are just no words for. There was (and is) no way to talk about it. There only was (and only is) shock and disbelief. I am bad at talking in the best of times, and so when I had the opportunity to make a meal for these friends (because, strangely, we still need to eat) and they asked if there would be pie involved, the best thing I could think to do was pull these jars out of the freezer.
photo(18)Even when the small things I can offer (hugs, tears, pie) seem so ridiculously inadequate, I am glad to have something to offer all the same.

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A Brief Announcement…

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Mini Pie

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

contest, mini pies, pie-in-a-jar

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to show you a picture of Levi’s hand, choosing, at random, an international Pie-in-a-Jar testing volunteer.

(He did the same thing for the domestic crew.)

(His eyes were closed, so there was no cheating or bias involved.)
photo-4

 

And the winners of this highly sophisticated name drawing are…

 

photo-5

 

Jen Wallace in Melbourne, Australia, and Eric Lange in Norfolk, Virginia (I mean, I think it’s you, Eric. I can’t imagine who else could possibly be known as the Norfolk Ninja?)

Hooray!! Congratulations!!

(Jen, make sure you give Tim a bite. For the sake of marital harmony.)

I have decided to add one more taste-tester to my list. And that is Thamar Alexander, who first gave me the idea to make pies in a jar when she sent me this link in 2011.

If the three of you could so kindly scroll to the very bottom of this site and send your mailing addresses to the email address listed below, I will send you a Pie-in-a-Jar perhaps not in the very IMMEDIATE future but certainly in the not-so-distant future. 🙂

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Pie-in-a-Jar!

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jessica@peace-of-pie in Apple Pie, Mixed Fruit Pie, Summer Fruit Pie

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

apple, berry, blackberry, blueberry, jar, mini pies, pear, pie-in-a-jar, raspberry, spices, strawberry

Pie-in-a-Jar is as exciting as it sounds.

  • They’re pies. In JARS.
  • They’re so super cute.
  • I think they would hold up really well in the mail. Big question is whether they’ll hold up internationally. Now taking domestic and international volunteers to help me test this theory out.

IMG_0249

A year ago, I send some normal pie pies (as opposed to pie-in-a-jar pies) to a bake sale in Palm Springs benefitting the school I teach at. You can read that post here. This year, I was asked to contribute again to the same sale. I decided to make mini pies in jars this year after pondering the following key points.

  • What’s better than a slice of pie? A whole pie to yourself.
  • What’s more socially acceptable than eating a whole pie? Eating a whole mini pie.
  • What’s easier to transport than a jar with a lid?…Nothing.

(My points just seem to be rolling out in groups of three this evening.)

This post from Our Best Bites provided me with some inspiration, and even comes with some rather adorable labels to top your jars with. It’s worth checking out if you’re interested in making your own pies-in-a-jar. For my part, I did what I usually do…read some blog posts on the subject at hand, then decided not to follow any of the recipes after all. So, in all accuracy, I probably couldn’t replicate these exact mini pies ever again.

(Awkward silence as you ponder how unhelpful of a blog writer I really am…)

I made two types of pies-in-a-jar; a pretty basic apple pie with lots of spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, lemon and lemon zest) and a pear and mixed berry pie (strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, almond extract).

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I love how they look here, all packaged up and ready to travel!

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Have you ever tried baking pies (or anything else) in a jar? I would love to hear:

  • Stories about YOUR mini pie experiences, or questions about mine.
  • Interest in being a mail-tester for a pie-jar (depending on the number of comments I receive, I’ll put your name in a drawing.)
  • Which of the two above flavors you would have purchased had YOU attended the bake sale?

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