First Coconust Custard Pie!

So I made my first coconut custard pie ever. I used 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg and the pie seems to smell pretty strongly of it. Maybe next time I'll reduce the nutmeg if its taste is too strong in the pie.

From Coconut Custard Pie

From Coconut Custard Pie

Chasing the Crust

So I've been deliriously baking blueberry and cherry pies since Christmas 2008. I'm not sure what got me started but I cooked the dinners for this past Thanksgiving and Christmas so I guess I decided to try a pie out.

I think ever since then I've been churning out about a pie a week, alternating between blueberry and cherry. Going so far as to bring some in to co-workers so that I would have an excuse to keep making them. The original crust recipe that I used is an all butter crust from Simply Recipes. I'm not a cook or anything along those lines so I don't know why that exact recipe didn't work all that well for me. Some of the issues I ran into seemed to stem completely from the amount of water in the recipe.

The issues I had were:

• Needed to add an extra tablespoon or 2 of ice water to the dough
• When the pulsed mixture "stuck" together and appeared ready for kneading, it was pretty difficult to actually form the discs
• With the extra water, it seemed the bottom crust was not as flaky as I would have liked.

I've made a few minor modifications to the recipe now and it seems to have worked out pretty well. Here are the ingredients that I now use:

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
• 8 Tbsp (1 stick) salted butter, very-cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 4 to 5 Tbsp ice water, very cold

My kneading technique starts out with creating a small ball and packing more dough mixture to it as I go. The mixture is really powdery and doesn't easily stay together. I periodically and often break the ball apart to reform it while mindful that I don't do this for too long or else the chilled butter will start to melt.

After I let the dough rest in the fridge for an hour and then sit outside for about 15 minutes I start to massage and roll the dough out into a roughly 12 to 13 inch circle. The dough breaks relatively easy still so I have to patch it here and there. For my pie I always have a large overhang of dough so I pack and fold the top and bottom crust together pretty tightly.

I bake the pie as directed for 20 minutes at 425 degrees on the lower rack of the oven and then at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes

I'm still chasing that perfect crust so I'm still experimenting with it.

First One - Although with some frustrations

I tried out the two blog applications that Yahoo business includes with their website package. Both of them, suck. Actually, I should say that one of them sucks and the other's integration with Yahoo doesn't seem to be done well since I could never get into it. Yahoo allows you the option of using Movable Type or WordPress.

I was able to set up the Movable Type account through Yahoo. The admin interface for this blog application is pretty confusing. Moving around the settings and customization menu is a complicated process. Trying to set up categories and organize entries into categories took me a while to figure out and essentially is not very linear in a post's creation or editing workflow. Although it worked, it is very hard to use.

WordPress is the other option that Yahoo provides for you. Once I set this one up and tried to login I kept being told that I had an invalid username. I've deactivated and reactivated the WordPress blog each time and used various usernames and kept getting the same message. Even allowing it a few days before going back in to see if it required some extra time did not grant me access. WordPress just didn't seem to accept any of the set up information that Yahoo had taken during the blog creation.

So far this Blogger application was simple to set up, has easy labeling, and seems to be pretty user friendly. We'll see I guess as I try this out more.