Baking Battle- Pie Edition

And so, dear friends, we find ourselves in Bake-Off territory again.

There has been a lot of talk about pie in my life at the minute (more on this later) and so a pie-based bake-off was clearly the way forward. The rules were such:

1. Home made pastry, no shop bought laziness
2. The filling had to be sweet
3. The pie had to be wholly covered in pastry (no American style pie for this here challenge.)

Nancy and I had that day at work been discussing the theory of rhubarb and custard pie. A pie with inherent, built in custard. And i found this recipe, which had our mouths watering. So this was the obvious choice, wasn't it? Yes, I know the crumble topping would breach the rules, but i figured i would just ditch that for pastry, and away we go. So, armed with my shopping list, off I went ingredient shopping.

Except... THERE IS NO RHUBARB! anywhere! I went to numerous places in the market, no rhubarb. I went to a supermarket, hoping to find some GM mutant version from Chile or somewhere... Not a stick to be seen, except for the Encased-In-Tin variety. Tinned rhubarb felt like cheating though for a bake-off, so instead i grabbed the nearest fruit, which happened to be pears. I haven't actually had a pear for years, and could barely remember what they tasted like, so i thought this would be high-risk, but fun. I added some pecans into the mixture too, and a handful of sultanas, just because they were there. I had to blind bake the base, and i'm still not 100% used to the quirks of my oven, so the crust of the pie was a bit overdone.

Alas, no. Despite the fact that the pie tastes divine, it was unanimously voted against in favour of The Boy's Pie. Like me, he had to have a last minute ingredients change as he intended to make an apple and blackberry pie but could find no blackberries. So he opted for an apple and raspberry option. A robust, if a little on the safe side, choice of filling. And yes, lets give him a few extra points for his geeky decoration shall we? And let's kindly ignore the fact that the tail on his pi symbol is the wrong way around ;) (sorry, I am bitter about losing this challenge)

The Boy's pie

Pi Pie... See what he did there?

The judges this time were: Boy's parents, and brother. They were instructed to each come to an independent decision. And they each chose The Boy's pie. Suspicious? Lets hope so. "They said pie number 2 was burnt and they thought it was meat filled" he says. Well, please. Clearly the idea of a pie with integral custard is just too advanced for this world. Pff!