Those were my words in yesterday's post, following an out and out success with my cheese and mustard scones, and by god do I regret saying because it seems that there is someone up there granting my desires to come true... Well only in this case!
Today was meant to be so easy, an apple pie certainly doesn't sound like an overly difficult task, yet it was far more of a trial than I could have ever imagined. It began with the small task of shopping for the ingredients, things like buying cooking apples shouldn't be so difficult! My girlfriend and I went to pretty much every single fruit and veg market stall in the centre of (market town) Boston, which I call my home, and yet every time we got to one they'd either ran out of these seemingly precious fruits or had never stocked them.
- how can they be so precious?! I'm pretty sure we used to have a cooking apple tree in the back garden ( and so did the neighbours) but we got rid of them because the apples got everywhere, surely we didn't have the last one in my humble little town?! -
But finally we found one place with a few left and so I eagerly hoarded them in my bag in case someone else was in search of this green and bitter treasure...
As we arrived in the kitchen with flour, the precious apples and lard - something I almost forgot to buy so had to turn round and add an extra mile on the journey to get ( at least it helped working off the pie I'd soon be guzzling!) - the baking began.
And not for the whole of the challenge have I been so distraught and frustrated by any single recipe. It was just pastry, and yet it just wouldn't bend to my will! It wouldn't stay together - even after the half an hour in the fridge - and every time I attempted to roll it just stuck to the surface, despite almost covering the entire kitchen - let alone the surface - in flour. In other words it just wasn't going my way today, the pastry ended up being more like a dough which I had to squash into the dish and hope that it would work. I fact I became so sure that it would ultimately fail that I even kept some filling back for the retry.
Alas, it came out of the oven after nearly an hours worth of baking looking... Messy - that's the first word that comes to mind! - but it was still clearly edible, and really quite edible in the end. The pastry was very crumbly, as expected, but it certainly tasted good, and when covered with custard, cream or ice cream no one would bat an eyelid at how destroyed it was by simply lifting it out of the dish!
Not one to have to retry, but still, it certainly came close!
The Result:
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