Plum Pie

Autumn is the season of pies - apple, plum, pear, pumpkin - and we love them all! Yesterday I tried a new to me recipe for a plum pie - lots of butter and cinnamon and juicy plums, which combine into a genuinely delicious and aromatic coffee dessert.

Ingredients:

• 80 g butter
• 150 g sugar
• 10 g baking powder
• 8 g vanilla sugar
• 3 eggs
• 150 g flour
• 16-18 plums
• cinnamon + sugar for sprinkling
  

Beat the butter with the sugar, vanilla sugar and baking powder until homogenized. The butter needs to be soft, but not liquid. You can cream the butter if you want, but simple mixing is also sufficient. Add the eggs one by one to the butter-sugar mix and homogenize. Then add the flour. The batter is soft and creamy.

Pour the batter into the baking tray. Wash and dry the plums, halve them and arrange them on top of the batter, so that the plums cover the entire tray. Sprinkle on top with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. I used 1 tsp (5 g) cinnamon and 1 tbsp (20 g) sugar.

Place the baking tray in a preheated oven at 180C and bake until a toothpick test shows that the batter is baked. Better enjoyed cold with coffee or tea. You can sprinkle it with powdered sugar on top, or serve with whipped cream or ice cream.

My morning coffee yesterday morning. Yummy!!!

Another Apple Pie

I've started baking again this autumn and as I experiment with recipes and then forget them and often lose the pieces of paper I've written them on, I'm returning to blogging about baking. Here's the recipe I tried today - an apple pie, again:

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups flour
• 1 pack (10 g) baking powder
• 4 tbsp oil
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 cup cranberries, soaked in 2 tbsp rum
• 1/4 cup walnuts
• 1 big apple, peeled  and cut into small pieces
• 1 big pear, cut into small pieces

Preparation: Beat the eggs with the sugar, add the oil, flour with baking powder and cinnamon and stir. Add the cranberries, walnuts and pieces of fruit and pour the batter into a baking dish, greased with butter. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until ready.

Serve with coffee, milk or juice.

Double Layer Apple Cake

Lately I've been baking cakes almost daily, mostly with apples. Usually the apples, when sliced, not grated, being heavier than the batter, fall to the bottom of the cake. So, I've been wondering what if ...
What if I baked half the batter and then added the apples and the upper half?! Would the bottom be overdone? And today I came upon this pumpkin pie recipe, that uses the double layer method. So the question was settled, I had to try a double layer apple cake.

For the filling I used the above kilogram of apples, peeled, sliced and stewed in their own juice with 100 g sugar.
For the cake batter:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g sugar
• 50 g oil
• 250 g yogurt + 5 g baking soda
• 300 g flour + 10 g baking powder 
• cinnamon, vanilla

Preheat the oven at 180C. Pour half of the batter in the cooking dish (mine is 28 cm in diameter). Bake for half an hour. Then take the dish out of the oven, spread the stewed apples, distribute the remaining batter on top of the apples and return the dish in the oven for another 30-40 min. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

The only shortcoming of this cake - it's too delicious and is gone too quickly :)))

Pumpkin Pie

I've made this pie  many times with grated apples and it is considered by my family to be the best apple pie ever. This time we tried it with grated pumpkin instead and it is (almost) equally delicious :) - I still think I prefer the apples, but that's me - hubby liked the pumpkin better.

Ingredients: 

• 1 kg grated pumpkin
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 cup semolina
• 1 cup flour
• 10 g baking powder
• 100 g melted butter
• walnuts, cinnamon

 

Grate the pumpkin, add 1/2 cup of sugar, cinnamon and walnuts. Mix in a bowl the flour with the baking powder, the semolina and the remaining cup of sugar. Grease a baking dish with butter and spread a layer of 1/3 pumpkin, then a layer of 1/3 dry ingredients and 3-4 tbsp of melted butter. repeat the layering two more times. Place in a preheated oven and bake at 180 C for 40 min.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve cold with coffee, milk or tea. Enjoy!

This pie is very fruity and juicy and really super easy to make.

And on the knitting front - today I've been working on the design of a new little dog sweater with a simple Celtic knot. I think I got it figured out and I've already started knitting it. Stay tuned :)))

Apple Cobbler

I know I'm just discovering hot water but I had never heard of or tasted a cobbler before and the technique of preparation is something quite different from what I'm used to when making pies. How do people come up with such easy and delicious recipes, it amazes me! I came upon the recipe late last night and immediately pinned it to try first thing in the morning - and due to the light in the kitchen I took plenty of photos while making it - apples are so photogenic :)

This is probably the easiest and quickest to prepare fruit pie, the only time-consuming effort is the peeling of the apples, but I've arranged with hubby about that for the next time :)))

Ingredients for the apple layer:

• 6 average apples
• 4 tbsp sugar
• 2 tbsp melted butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• 120 ml warm water
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• fresh lemon peel
• vanilla and cinnamon

Ingredients for the batter:

• 2 tbsp soft butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp baking powder

Preparation: Peel and cut the apples in pieces. Add the water, lemon juice, lemon peel, vanilla, cinnamon, melted butter, sugar and flour, mix and put in a slightly greased baking tin. Mix the batter: stir the butter and the sugar, add the egg, add the sifted flour, mixed with the baking powder. The resulting batter is soft and creamy. Place the batter here and there on the apples. The amazing part - it will spread itself upon them and form a crust while baking, no need to try and form the layer beforehand.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the crust is light brown.

Cover with powdered sugar, if you like.

This was so quick and easy, I'll be baking more soon, probably will try pears too.

I served it with a spoonful of sour cream - m-m-m, D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S !!!

And a quick ring-shaped bread for lunch, served with cheese, butter and mixed spices. Made a bit in a hurry and not very skillfully shaped, but quite tasty nevertheless :)

And my latest project - a not so complicated self-drafted cardigan for my husband. I wanted it to have a small figure on the plain back, reflecting the cables on the front, but unlike the cable on my orange sweater, which is part of the yoke decreases, this figure had to lay flat and not to shrink the back. So I played with it all afternoon and came up with this chart, compensating for the cables with adding and then decreasing additional stitches. I think I'm quite happy with it and now can proceed to knitting it onto the back of the cardigan.

Blackberry Pie

I made this pie on Monday with blackberries we gathered along the track on Plana Mountain. This is the first time I'm making such dough and I know the pie doesn't look very professionally made, but it was quite delicious :)

Ingredients for the dough:

• 2 1/2 cups of flour
• 125 g cold butter
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 pinch of salt
• 8 tbsp of cold water

Mix all of the ingredients for the dough and knead until the dough is homogeneous. Divide into two balls. Spread the first ball into a 1/2 cm thick sheet, place it in the baking tin and leave it in the fridge to cool.

For the blackberry filling:

• 200 g blackberries
• 2 tbsp flour
• 4 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp softened butter

Place the blackberry filling in the first sheet, spread the second ball of pastry and cover the filling. Make a few openings in the upper sheet. Glaze with egg and milk. Bake in a preheated oven at 200C.

Plum Pie - Three Takes

Yes, I'm afraid the family has been living on plum pies these days :)))
First the recipe, to get it out of the way. I believe by now I know it by heart :)
Origin - Labrex

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g milk
• 50 g oil
• 200 g flour
• 200 g sugar
• 5 g baking powder
• vanilla
• plums

Beat the eggs with the sugar, add the oil and the milk. Sift the flour with the baking powder and add to the batter. Spice with vanilla. Pour the batter in a baking dish, arrange the halved plums on top and bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the tooth pick test indicates that it is ready. Preparation time - less than 15 minutes.

And now the story. I read the recipe and decided to try it, as I love plums. I bough half a kg of round plums of a variety that are usually very juicy and sweet. However, mine turned out extremely sour, like wild plums. I baked the pie in my smaller baking dish, that I usually use for pies (24 cm). The pie had a very delicious crisp crust and was super juicy, but the center was a bit sodden and the plums were too sour. I liked it, especially the crust, but it obviously needed improvement.

So, I decided to try it again with a different variety of plums and my bigger baking dish. I bought only a handful of plums as they looked very small and unripe and there weren't any other plums in the supermarket. However obviously appearances are misleading as they turned out to be very sweet. I also added more flour - 240 g. The second pie was perfectly baked, tasted like sponge-cake but the plums were insufficient and it didn't have the crisp crust of the first pie.

Wild flowers bouquet picked from the small stadium we've been jogging lately (have to burn all these pies :))))

Yesterday I made a third attempt - I added only 200 g flour as in the first pie and as many plums as I could stick in and baked it again in the big dish. I also filled the plums with vanilla sugar and the house smelled divinely while baking. This pie has the same sponge-cake structure as the second pie, again without the crisp crust, but is more juicy because of the more plums. Hubby likes it so much that I had to struggle with him to take a few pictures of the baked pie :)))

OK, I think I'm done with plums, maybe I'll try figs or pears next time.

Update: I tried the same recipe today with fruit salad - a peach, a pear and a handful of plums, cut into pieces and spiced with vanilla sugar.

Divine, probably the best so far! However, the pear does stand out as the most sweet and delicious of all, so undoubtedly a pear pie would be a smashing success.