They say “Pie Pie, till you succeed”. Is that the right way of saying it??? Well in the current situation it sure would be pretty. So carrying on, when you don’t succeed the first time, you Pie it again (there I go again)! When the first attempt didn’t go as planned, I just had to Pie it again (I promise, this is the last time).
When you try it again (phew, no more pie silliness), you try and avoid the pitfalls of the previous attempt. So before you get your bake together (now that’s a clever play on words, if you agree to see it that way), you try and figure out what you didn’t get right the first time around. The first possibility could be that you ended up kneading the dough, as advised against by the recipe and your friend Hemangi, cause kneading causes the gluten to come up (if I got this concept right), but then the dough was not quite binding so I did knead it, a little bit too longer than I should. Or maybe you just let it rest more than you actually rested.
Whatever the reason may have been, you felt the need to do it all over again, or maybe you just wanted to bake a fresh pie for your friends. Then you also wanted to take your minds from that what troubles it faced. So in the end you wanted to do some baking therapy.
So as you prepared your dough, you tried your best to avoid tbt pitfall of the previous bake, but then the dough doesn’t bind easily and you’re worried about once again overdoing it. You take a deep breath and slowly bind the dough, trying not to knead the batter, breathing a sigh of relief when it all comes together.
Setting it aside you work on preparing the filling. And after pealing two apples (actually make that four, two from the previous day) you come to a conclusion that you would rather run a marathon, or dance bachata, than try and peel an apple ( on second thought, using a knife would have been a better option than using a potato peeler, but then this boy has no knife man-ship skills). So in hindsight, I was better off doing what I did.
Once the filling was done its time to bake. But before you get to that step you have to roll the dough. This time around you try and do things a bit differently. Firstly no blind baking (I.e. baking the dough, the bottom crust, in advance, something I learned thanks to Hemangi and Google), and rolling the dough on the floor, cause face it, rolling it on a polpat (as my mumma termed it) meaning that the dough wouldn’t go beyond the rolling surface, and adjustment would mean damaging the rolled dough (which I know I am expert at).
So siting, and at times squatting, I rolled the dough, up and down and left to right, from all angles, though not getting the perfect circle, put thankfully not the map of India or even the world. So then you fold it and do it all over again, till you get the perfect dough, or something very remotely close to it (face it you are not an amateur baker also). You place the your dough on your pie pan (which your mumma has oiled, or greased for you), and you proceed to add the filling, as neatly and picturesque as possible (common I need to click pictures for my post). But no matter how careful or artistically you think you’re doing, it all looks a bit, ok quite, clumsy. But then you have to be proud at what you’ve managed to accomplish.
So finally you roll the covering dough and you cover your pie. Make holes with a fork to let the steam through, trying to make a pattern, instead of making it look very random. You try your best to give the edges of the pie some design, courtesy of your fork. You lightly brush it with milk and dust cinnamon powder as well as sugar on it and viola (and not Davis), your pie is ready for the oven.
After preheating the oven, in goes the pie, to be baked at 180 degrees Celsius for a whole 60 minutes. But then you have this nagging feeling at the back of your head that you have forgotten something. And then you realise that you have forgotten to add drops of butter, or olive oil, as mentioned in the recipe. You simply put the blame squarely on those lessening grey cells, and just hope that your bake goes well.
Now as your pie is in the oven you are constantly checking on it if it’s getting too brown (in short, burnt), or do you want to lower the temperature. You try your best not to panic, if things don’t go as plan, but just wished that they have damned well put a light bulb in there so that you could actually see the pie bake.
After waiting patiently for almost an hour, the buzzer goes off and it’s time to get the pie out of the oven. When you get it out, you look at it with great pride. It may not be perfect but it sure has hell looks good. You remove the pie off the baking tray, after all the jatkas you inflict on yourself, and you let it cool. But then also you try to click pics of it cause your write up needs some pics.
When it finally cools down, you cut slices of the pie, taking some for your friends at dance class. You try and taste a bit of it and you surprise yourself that’s it has not come out bad (as you were scared it would), in fact it’s quite good for a not so amateur attempt at baking. Yes the apples tasted a bit tart, and the crust ain’t that flaky as it should be, barring that, everything is good. So woohooo, another good attempt.
So there you have it, the adventure of baking an Apple Pie.
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