Apathetic Thursday

For those of you who don’t know me. I love pie. While in Canada last month I had the opportunity to have a Maple Pie in a neat little cafe called Terrasse La Nouvelle. I was very impressed by this pie because it had a texture similar to a pumpkin pie, yet was sweet like a pecan pie. It didn’t taste like pumpkin, and neither was the maple flavor very strong. If I remember correctly, it was also a light-ish grey in color.

I knew that I had to try to duplicate this pie over the summer, and I knew that my mom would love to help me. So tonight we decided to try to tackle our Maple Pie. The first thing my mom did was surf the net to try to find a recipe, but instead she found several recipes stemming from two different methods, one being a pumpkin base, the other being a gelatin base. We decided to try the pumpkin base for starters, and we ended up going with a fairly standard pumpkin pie but without the seasonings.

We started with making a crust. A good crust makes a pie twice as good, and a store bought crust is not good. We needed a single crust, so just double this recipe for a single crust pie:

1 cups of flour
1/2 tsp salt
6 tbsp butter Crisco
Mix together well consistency should be like cornmeal, add
4-6 tbl ice water, mix in gently a few spoonfuls at a time KEY to flaky crust, don’t over work the dough once you put the water on it. Use a fork to FLUFF it once the water is added.
roll out in a circle

We rolled the crust out, and then placed it in our 9 inch pie pan. With the crust taken care of, we set to creating the pie filling. In our case, we used:

1 1/2 cups canned pumpkin
1/4 cups maple syrup
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
4 eggs
2 tbsp flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp maple flavoring

We mixed all of the ingredients together, and had our oven preheated to 350 degrees. We put the pie in the oven, and baked it for about 45 minutes, turning the temp down to 325 after the first 10 minutes to provide a more even baking of the pie.

When the pie was sufficiently cooked we took it out and let it cool. Then we were able to try our creation. This is my favorite part. Our final result was not like the pie I had at the little cafe in Quebec. But it is a very unique pie, and I am pleased with how it turned out. To me, the pie tastes almost like a pancake, because the maple syrup is a strong flavor, yet I can still taste a hint of pumpkin in the pie. The crust is excellent, it is very flaky and very good.

Once this pie is gone, we will have to make another attempt at our Maple Pie, probably trying from the gelatin standpoint. I’ll let you know how it turns out. In the mean time, I have pie to eat!