The Pie Ho
Another Pieminister pie for y’all. I promise to get back to my own pie devices soon, though if you’re anything like me you say you care about the recipes when you favorite the post, but you really just want to look at the food porn pics. Don’t deny it.
The ‘swirl’ part of this pie comes from strawberry liqueur that you cut into the custard and mascarpone filling, but I’m lazy and cheap and so I forewent the boozey bit and just layered the strawberries on top. The crust is just my regular sweet crust (recipe here). Basically, this pie would have been extraordinarily easy if not for the fact that I had to make the custard from scratch. In England you can just go out to the shop and buy custard in a tub, but not so in America. It wasn’t hard, but I still managed to screw it up just enough that the final result was slightly lumpy. Not enough to be off putting, just enough to be questionable.
I got the recipe for the custard out of mycopy of theunofficial Harry Potter cookbook. I know, I’m a nerd.
- 4 tbsp (1/4 cup) granulated sugar
- 3 tbsp cornstarch
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 1/2 cup whole milk
- 3 large egg yolks (I used 4 small)
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
You combine two tablespoons of sugar, the cornstarch, the salt, and the milk in a saucepan and stir until the dry elements are dissolved in the milk. Then you heat them on a medium-high flame/setting until they get thick, stirring constantly. Trust me, you’ll know when it gets thick; it goes from lumpy to viscous in five seconds flat. Remove it from heat and whisk the egg yolks and the remaining sugar together. Pour half of the cornstarch/milk mixture into the egg yolks, whisk, and repeat with the remaining portion of the mixture. Add the vanilla, return to the saucepan, and heat on medium-high again until thick. Push it through a strainer with a rubber spatula to (supposedly) remove lumps and let it cool in the refrigerator.
(Damn if that isn’t the most perfect crust specimen I’ve ever seen. Well done self, well done.)
It turned out pretty good (if not, as I said, lumpy). If you want to use this recipe in your pie, now you have it, if you’re just an American anglophile and want to just make the custard for shits and giggles, that’s fine too. Dip some fish fingers in it, amiright? Doctor Who jokes anyone? Sigh.
Basically that’s all that’s in this pie; pre-cooked sweet crust, custard, mascarpone, and strawberries. Even though I don’t want to give you the recipe and thus am not giving you exact measurements, you can figure it out if your clever enough. (Or justbuythe Pieminister cookbook, you simply cannot regret it. I should note they’re not paying me to push their cookbook or anything, I just worship them is all.)
Overall, I probably should have put the strawberry liqueur in, so the A- it’s getting is my bad.
