July 3, 2009

I know lots of you are going to be grilling for July 4th, and you're going to need a dessert that doesn't involved heating up the kitchen with a blazing oven, right?  Right.

When I think of a cool no-bake dessert, the first thing that comes to my mind – and makes my mouth water – is the classic Cherry Cream Cheese Pie!  When we were kids, this was our favorite.  There weren't many leftovers with 4 kids around, but whoever got up earliest the next morning always scarfed up the remaining bit of pie for breakfast!  SisMama still makes this and we all still love it!

It looks like Paula Deen makes our Cherry Cream Cheese Pie too!  That's one of the things we love about you Paula…you know what good is, whether it's fancy foo-foo or not!

Cherry Cream Cheese Pie from Paula Deen

This other awesome cool pie just popped back into my head today.  I got this recipe from a boss MANY blue moons ago!  I wish my darn camera hadn't passed away, and I'd make this and take a photo, but alas, I'm still camera-less.  I do have two notes on this recipe for you.

1. Do they still make Dream Whip?  I hope so, because this is a good pie and I'm not sure what we'd substitute for it.
2. Fresh Texas blueberries are so awesome now that I feel guilty giving you a recipe using blueberry pie filling, but I'm sure you could modify the recipe to use the fresh blues.

Now for the pie!

Banana Blueberry Pie

2 graham cracker pie crusts
3 bananas, sliced
2 packages Dream Whip
1 cup sugar
Dash of salt
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 can blueberry pie filling

Line pie crusts with banana slices.  Mix Dream Whip as directed on package.  Mix sugar and salt with cream cheese and add to prepared Dream Whip.  Pour into shells over bananas and cool until firm, about 1/2 hour.  Top with pie filling.  Keep refrigerated.

I haven't mentioned it before, but I'm not the hugest Rachael Ray fan in the world.  I'm not hatin', cause life's too short for that; I'm just not lovin'.  I do have to give snaps to her for her scrumptious-looking Frozen Mojito Cake-tail. Note that I didn't say yummo, or delish…I just said scrumptious.  This dish screams summer to me, and it's all boozed up with rum!

Rachael Ray's Frozen Mojito Cake-tails

Enjoy your 4th of July everyone, and stay cool with a delicious no-bake dessert!

~BigSis

June 6, 2009

When I was about 10 years old, a peach almost killed me.  Yep, a sweet, juicy, fuzzy little peach was nearly the end of me!  I was spending part of the summer in West Texas with my grandparents as usual, and had been eating juicy fresh peaches as usual.  My grandmother made awesome peach fried pies and incredible spiced pickled peaches with cloves.  She had peach trees in the backyard and made great use of them.

So, one nice summer day, I went to my cousins' house for a visit.  I can remember sitting on a swing in their backyard, eating a fresh peach.  I can remember getting itchy, then starting to wheeze, and then getting swollen all over.  By the time I got into the house, I passed out, and then drifted in and out of consciousness for what seemed like hours before they took me to the emergency room to be pumped full of benadryl and adrenalin.

Since I grew up to be BigSis, clearly I survived that attack of anaphylactic shock.  My body just had enough of peaches, and said it wished to have no more of them, please.  When I heard that this month's You Want Pies with That event would have a Childhood Memories theme, those peachy memories came back to me.  My whole family has mouth-watering and sentimental memories of Grandmama's fried pies, although I obviously can't make her peach ones.  In her honor, I decided to make cherry fried pies, for my first time ever.

I don't have my own recipe for these little jewels, so I found recipes online for pie pastry and cherry pie filling that both sounded delicious and got 5 star reviews.  And being a bake-from-scratch snob, I was definitely not interested in using flattened biscuits with canned pie filling.  I did have one little complication right off the bat, which was that the filling was surprisingly too juicy for little fried pies, so I revised my plan a bit and made a whole pie.  No biggie, just a little adjustment.

Looks pretty good, right?  I was kind of happy with the golden brownness, and was feeling a little proud of myself since I love to bake, but I'm not a pie maker.  It intimidates me and intrigues me at the same time.  But so far, so good.  I cut into the pie, and still found more juice than I really wanted, but no worries!  It's yummy cherry juice, so it's all good!  And I thought the slice on the plate looked pretty tasty!  What do you think?  Not so bad for a novice pie girl.

The next test…take a bite!  I took a bite, and took another bite, and took another bite.  Guess what?  It was HORRIBLE!!  Not just bad.  Not just “oh, you're so overly critical of your own baking”.  No.  It was DISGUSTING!  It's actually in my sink at this moment, crumpled in bits and pieces, awaiting it's little trip down the garbage disposal.  THAT bad.

What could be so bad, you say?  Well, the pastry was not flaky and light.  It was the polar opposite: heavy and soggy on the top and bottom.  The juice soaked into it and just made yukky mush.  Even though I baked it the recommended amount of time, I don't think the bottom crust was even done.  Bleh.  On top of that, the pastry's flavor was just off and weird.  The tiny bit of almond extract in the filling was grossly overwhelming and the filling was WAY too liquidy.  Altogether, it was so nasty that not even HayHay-the-15-Year-Old-Eating-Machine would touch it.  I would be ashamed to offer it to him or anyone else.

So, why do I bother posting on this disaster?  Cause it's pretty damn funny to me!  It's hilarious, in fact.  I make such a big ding dang deal out of baking from scratch, and then I have a catastrophe of Titanic proportions like this, and it just cracks me up.  One thing I don't do is take myself too seriously, and it's a good thing!  Plus, you can't try anything new if you're too afraid to fail.  Chances are I'll have lots more beautiful disasters on my way to successful pastry baking!

Next time, I'll try to do you proud, Grandmama!  I'm not giving up!  Meanwhile, please visit You Want Pies With That on June 8th to see the work of successful pie bakers!  I'm off to the grocery store for biscuits and canned pie filling.

~BigSis