Pie Party

Last weekend was the annual croquet party at my parents' house.  As per recent tradition, we didn't actually play croquet.  In keeping with longer-running tradition (this is the 30th year of the party), we had great food.

The theme of the party was PIE (in all caps) and I baked a great variety: coconut cream, plum, lemon meringue, beet, chocolate chess and a gluten and dairy-free plumberry meringue.  My mother baked a key lime and other friends brought strawberry rhubarb, fruit pizza, ice cream pie, another key lime and rhubarb with a crumble top. It was my kind of event.

Plum prior to baking

For those following recipes-- the chocolate chess, an overall hit, is from the first or second recipe that pops up on google (the one that calls for 5 Tbs of cocoa).  The lemon meringue from Art of Pie is slightly easier (no double-boiler required) and slightly more lemon-y than that from Susan Purdy's As Easy as Pie (which my mother had baked a week prior to almost instantaneous devouring from my family).  The beet, which was a beet-forward rich custard with lots of beets, from Martha Stewarts early 1980s Pies and Tarts, was the best sweet beet pie I've ever had, but it wasn't great and I'm not that interested in beet pie to figure out how to make it great. The coconut cream is from the Magpie book, as were my crusts. The plum was made following the basic recipes in Art of Pie and the Plumberry included all sorts of fruits left in my parents' kitchen, cooked with some sugar and folded with microwaved marshmallows and placed in an almond flour-coconut-pecan-date crust.  Indeed, I made that one up.






As I am keeping records, I should add that I baked a rhubarb-blackberry with a twisted lattice earlier in June while we were still in Oklahoma.  For it I made the cream cheese crust from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible.  It was flakier than the Magpie crust while warm, but didn't necessarily taste better and the texture did not hold to the breakfast leftovers.