Jelly Pie

31 Tuesday Mar 2020

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

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Hello friends. I hope you’re all keeping well. The last several weeks have (strangely enough) held many moments of connection and encouragement for our family, including virtual church services, long video chat catch ups with faraway friends, and also just good quality time (and lots of it) among the three of us. I feel the weight of those who are sick or are caring for the sick, for those spending too much time in unhappy homes, and for those who are in uncertain economic situations…I could go on. I am sure all of this is on your mind also. Let’s all think of new ways we can reach out to those around us with love every day, within the confines of our current norm.

As is the way, we’ve been going out to grocery shop as little as possible. When we do, we are still so blessed in the variety of beautiful fresh food available to us. I am finding my local farm market to be a great place to go (especially first thing in the morning!)

But even with the abundance of fresh fruit and veg available to us, I did have a thought that this might be a good time to make a pie that features an ingredient I have looked for in multiple stores and never found…and I’m talking BEFORE coronavirus was a household term. Since I’d have to buy this ingredient online at some point, why not now?

This mystery ingredient I’m talking about is Red Currant Jelly, in order to make a (logically named) Red Currant Jelly Pie. I’d like to take a moment to congratulate this pie for being the first in a long time to force me into creating a brand new “category” for a blog post. Because honestly, it doesn’t fit into any of those I’ve created already…it’s close to, but not actually sugar pie…not quite legitimately summer fruit pie…nary a cream, custard, or chiffon involved…so now I have a Jelly Pie category all of its own.

Ken Haedrich is a wonderful writer and I love the detailed descriptions of various pie origins he includes in his cookbook. This was one of those times though that I gotta say Ken left me with more questions than answers. This sentence right here, “Jelly Pie is a relative of transparent pie.” And…? What, pray tell, is a transparent pie? Should I start another post category now?! How closely related are they; cousins? Mother and child? More research is needed on this front.

Here’s my cute kumquat-eating baby pie blog model, I hope she makes you smile. Some days she’s helpful in the kitchen. This day she was feeling helpful and I let her taste the jelly (in between kumquat bites).

Sidebar: If I ever were to figure out how to make a kumquat pie, Pippa would be thrilled. (Sidebar of Sidebar, Levi did make kumquat marmalade last night. He’s never made marmalade before. This is one of those things that’s partly related to having more forced time at home but also totally something he would have done anyway.)

ANYWAY here’s what the filling (a lot of butter, sugar, eggs, some cornmeal, and lemon juice, along with the red currant jelly) looks like when you’re beating it.

I made a mistake in the order of ingredients added, which sometimes happens when you have a 1 3/4 year old as your sous chef; namely, adding eggs prior to the liquefied jelly rather than after. I worried myself that the filling’s consistency wouldn’t be right as a result. But, having never made a pie of the jelly pie category before, I wouldn’t really have known what I expected to see in the first place. Spoiler alert, everything was fine.

As promised in the book description, the surface caramelized towards the end of baking, resulting in an almost crème brûlée type of situation. Really worth noting if you’re going to try baking this pie yourself; ten minutes before it’s done, you peek at it and it’s a strange pale color and you think it’s nowhere near done. And then within a short time the entire surface changes completely and looks harder, darker, and much more “finished”. A magical transformation.

I.e. a chemical transformation. Cause chemistry is magical.

Serve with whipped cream, unsweetened. It’s important. A cup of tea, too. Maybe a 2-4 player card game.

Levi described the flavor of this pie as similar to a key lime pie, in that there is both sweetness and tartness. So perhaps that’s the true relative here. Step aside, “transparent pie”, whatever you are.

Have a beautiful day, get some sunshine and fresh air if you can, and maybe bake something delicious. Peace be unto you.

Adventure Awaits

21 Thursday Dec 2017

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

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

raspberry, red currant, travel

Dear Friends,

It has been a while, and I have so much to share. This post will be a little longer than usual, will contain more photos than usual (Iceland is just too beautiful) and even contains some exciting life updates, so please do stick around if you have a few moments to spare. As always, thanks for visiting.

I can’t say that I went on a four-day trip to Iceland planning on baking a pie there. It happened something like this.

Levi and I flew to Iceland and met up with Maggie and José. It felt like the dead of night when we landed at 4:00 am and the sun wouldn’t rise until nearly 10. We sort of functioned (and I sort of napped) until the Laundromat Cafe in Reykjavik opened up and served us pancakes.

The rest of the day is a blur of alternating sleepy road tripping (thanks to Levi for being our non-sleepy driver) and cold, windy, breathtakingly beautiful scenery breaks. I’ll include several more photos at the end of this post. In the meantime, would you just look at these horses?! ❤

One of our missions for this first long day was to stock groceries, mainly breakfasts for the next several days at our AirBnB. I went to peruse the fruit selection in the store, thinking perhaps that a pie might be feasible…maybe an apple pie, something really simple…and that was when I saw these beauties.

At long last, I had found the elusive fresh red currant! I knew instantly which pie I would make. It was one that I’d had my eye on during many summer visits to Minnesota, where it seemed like the currants at the local farm were always either almost ripe enough, or the growing season had just ended. A massive frustration in my pie-making career…and now, the red currants had found me–in Iceland, of all places! It was time to make New Hampshire Raspberry and Red Currant Pie.

The team helped me to assemble everything else I would need, including a lemon, red currant jelly, raspberries, and Icelandic butter. (As an aside, I could write an entire blog post just about how good Icelandic butter is.)

Pie-making commenced the following morning with berry-sorting and pastry-forming. It was a Monday, and I was just over ten weeks pregnant with our first baby. Until I hit the ten-week mark on the day before we flew to Iceland, I’d been struggling pretty hard with nausea, exhaustion, and lack of motivation to do much of anything, let alone bake a pie. Given that context, this experience, and really the whole vacation, felt like a small – no, a large – miracle. I was so grateful.

I’m fifteen weeks pregnant now, due in mid-June, and my belly isn’t quite as tiny as it is in the photo above. As our baby grows and I talk to her/him more and more I am also growing more and more excited for the adventure that awaits. I look forward to showing this new little person how beautiful the world can be, how to have faith when things are scary, and how much they are loved–by Levi and I, by our incredible friends and family, by God the Creator and Jesus the Savior.

(Insert sappy family photo here.)

(I also can’t wait to tell baby about the great adventures they had in Iceland while still in the womb. Seriously. This baby is well-traveled already.)

Okay, back to pie.

José had never made a pie before and was a devoted sous-chef/student throughout the making of the red currant pie. We still haven’t quite determined the best Spanish word for pie, so we went with “pastel”.

While this recipe calls for a cream cheese pastry (and I do love Ken’s cream cheese pastry), in order to cut down on ingredient waste and grocery shopping bill I decided to use only the decadent Icelandic butter I spoke of earlier. I have struggled in the past making pie crust in other countries, as I find the flour and fat often don’t combine the way I’m used to with U.S. products, and I sometimes find myself with an overly sticky pastry. This time, the dough turned rock hard (it had been in the fridge during the day while we were out tromping around glaciers) and wouldn’t thaw enough to be rolled for about an hour. #icelandproblems

José has been writing “Amigos 2017” or some variation of this on cakes all year and I think he was excited to be able to write it on a pie for the first time. “Amigos J, L, M, J”. Unsurprisingly he put himself last. He is that kind of a person.

This sounds too poetic to be true, but after we chilled the finished pastel in nature’s icebox (our deck) for about half an hour, we ate this perfectly sour-sweet treat under the green glow of the Northern Lights. It was a night I will never forget for as long as I live.

I always say that pie is for sharing, and it’s definitely for sharing when you’re only baking for 4.1 people. We left a large slice for our AirBnB hosts and I was even able to wrap up a few pieces and smuggle them back to Chicago, our next stop, where we celebrated Thanksgiving with my family. Everyone was able to have one or two bites!