Lady Vengeance Pie

So, last night we held a really special meeting of Private Pie at the Star and Shadow Cinema. you can read all about it at the Private Pie blog here.

I decided to make two pies for the event: a sweet and a savoury. Some of you may already know that I am a bit of a fiend for Asian Extreme Horror Films, so I thought it would be cool to do something on that theme. I also went to go and see a load of Korean and Japanese horror films at the Star and Shadow, so it seemed like Lady Vengeance, my favourite of Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy. Here's an explanation of what I made, and how it links in with the film:

Tofu:
In Korea, a block of white tofu is presented to people on leaving prison. Its a symbol of purity and of starting a new life. This symbol appears twice in the film- at the beginning as she leaves prison, and at the end, when she represents the white tofu in a cake. A few weeks earlier, someone on Twitter recommended this recipe for chocolate tofu pie, so it seemed to me that it would fit nicely.

The chocolate tofu mixture in my pate sucree pastry case,

Strawberry Mousse:
On her release from prison, Geum-Ja finds a job in a bakery. Here's what the bakery owner has to say about her:

 "He tells her that he was astonished at a strawberry mousse made by a prison inmate who, using poor ingredients, made a dessert "fit for a king."

So I thought a lovely strawberry mousse topping would be perfect. I went for this BBC good food recipe

The strawberry mousse layer

Pink/Red:
See her eye-make up? That's quite a feature of the film, as Geum-Ja uses a change in her appearance to symbolise her departure from innocence to one intent on revenge. I had to go for a have a pink/red colour theme, and it had to be pretty- Geum-Ja likes pretty things, as do I, so I used pink sugar pearls which I let dissolved into the topping, and liberal applications of red glitter, with some little bits of red icing here and there. I also used some pink and red sugar roses, to add extra prettiness. I think Geum-Ja would have liked that.

With pink and red decorations

White
I made some meringue hearts with the leftover egg whites from the pate sucree, to pick up the theme of the purity from the tofu. And, of course, we have to bear in mind that everything Geum-Ja does is for the love of her daughter.

Blood
This is a revenge film, featuring plenty of blood. I used red gel food colouring to make blood spatter.

The fully assembled pie, ready for eating at Private Pie.

The resulting pie was rather tasty, although very sloppy as it was pretty hot in the room. If it was kept nice and clilled, I think it would make for a very pretty slice. And don't let the tofu put you off- its just really there for the texture, and you certainly can't taste it. the mousse was delicious, and i had plenty left over to give to friends and to make a pretty little dessert for myself as well.

 

 

Hxxx

Porter Cream Pie

Our last Private Pie Club meeting's theme was "Local Tipples"

I am a HUGE real ale fan and always have been, so this theme really excited me. Beer and pie are obvious partners but i was really excited about how our members were going to be creative with the theme.

I had set my heart on making a sweet pie with beer, but wasn't quite sure how to go about it. As usual, the first step in researching was google, and i stumbled across this beer cream pie blog post. I knew this was the one.

I was fairly short of time, so I ended up making the pies for the meeting the night before without doing a practice run. I was a bit nervous to start with that it was all going to go horribly wrong, which may explain the events that followed.

I merrily made a chocolate shortcrust pastry and blind baked the crust. Nothing untoward here.

Then I mixed the melted chocolate with the porter and brushed a good thick layer of this divine stuff onto the pastry case. Again, all went smoothly. The porter i was using was Hadrian and Borders Ouseburn porter.

Then it came to making the custard. Here, total panic and disaster struck, as the custard just wouldn't set at all (in reality, I think i was too impatient and didn't really let it cool down as much as i should before taking action). For some reason, it seemed like a good plan to put some gelatin in... So in went one sachet... Then i thought i needed some more (again i clearly hadn't left it for long enough to make this decision rationally)... and some more.... so in total i put in three sachets of gelatin.

Eventually, the custard started setting... And then it continued setting, then set a bit more. Undeterred, I
went ahead and decorated the tart with some of the leftover porter chocolate mixture and some gold leaf. It looked pretty good in the end:

The verdict at pie club was that it tasted nice, but had a very odd texture. Emergency gelatin really wasn't a good plan at all. One member put it very nicely: "I think you might have invented a new material for breast implants"

Steak and Mushroom Pie

At the moment, my life appears to revolve around one thing.

Pie.

Pie has become the epicentre of my very being. You can read all about the exciting goings on in team Private Pie here.

Meanwhile, Boyf and I are attempting to plough through the Hairy Biker's Perfect Pies book to get some serious pastry-based experience in.

So, last weekend we made a hearty steak and mushroom pie from their book. Bear in mind that I was rather hung over after drinking an awful lot of wine the night before, and the recipe entails using a fair amount of red wine. Luckily, Boyf was willing to stand in at that point to take over and to limit the amount of alcoholic fumes i inhaled. 

Now, if you ask me, an ideal pie has some sort of decoration which reflects what's inside it. It turns out that all of my bento-ing experience seems to be coming in handy for this purpose. For the pastry  mushroom, I used an idea from Cute Yummy Time, with a punched- out nori happy face. Meanwhile, Boyf had responsibility for  producing the cow. 

Of course, a little bit of basic maths never goes amiss either when considering pie decoration. And who could argue that steak + mushroom = yum?

NOM!

 

Chicken Pie Is a Drug

I got a lot of pie-related goodies for Christmas, what with being a co-founder of Private Pie and all. Santa seems to approve of this new venture of mine, as I got a new pie dish, a pastry server, a blackbird funnel, and both the Pieminster Cookbook and the Hairy Bikers' Perfect Pies book.

The latter was a present from Boyf, so we decided to make a pie together on New Year's Day. We went for the first recipe, a creamy chicken, ham, and leek double-crusted pie.

The recipe was really simple to make, and my goodness, it smelt wonderful when it was baking. We probably spent longer decorating the pie that we did actually preparing it!

Chicken! Cos it's got chicken in the pie, you see!

One beautifully baked narcotic pie

Pig! because of the ham content!

Plate of Pie Joy. The warm, creamy filling doesn't make for perfect presentation

We each had a slice and it was really scrumptious. So we each had another slice. And we instantly felt pleasantly happy and sleepy. Much napping on the sofa ensued... This pie appears to have opiate-like effects on the central nervous system. I suspect it may also be as addicted as morphine. 

Hayley xxx

UPDATE: Today I woke up with a really sore, stiff neck. I can confirm that, having consumed a slice of this pie, my pain rating has decreased. Big Pharma should be investigating this. I would be a willing participant in any clinical trials.

Cooled pie makes for much more presentable slices.

Finally, the Christmas pie recipe you've all been waiting for!

Hi there my lovelies,

Finally, I'm getting round to catching up on some blogging. Not sure how useful this here Christmas pie recipe will be to you, now that the festive season is over and done with for another year, but here it is in all it's glory, ready for you to print out and frame to put above your mantel piece :)

It's a surprisingly easy recipe, but really well-loved by all who try it. It makes for a perfect Christmas Eve tea. You can just use frozen shortcrust pastry if you're short of time, but the basic recipe i use is so easy to make it seems daft not to whip up a batch of your own delicious pastry. This recipe is based on one from BBC Good Food magazine from years ago, but over the years i've made a few tweaks which i think improve it quite a bit. The other great thing about this pie is that it can be made well in advanced and frozen- i usually make a couple at a time- one for work, one for christmas, and this year, one for pie club!

For the pastry, I use the BBC Good Food basic shortcrust recipe... So easy, but it's best to double up the quantities to make sure you've enough for this substantial pie. I also add a tablespoon or so of paprika, which makes the recipe my own and means the pastry has a lovely deep colour when it's baked.

Ingredients:

-2 tbsp olive oil
- knob of butter
- 1 finely chopped onion
-500g sausagemeat
- dash of lemon juice
-100g fresh white breadcrumbs
-85g dried apricots
-60g canned or tinned chestnuts, chopped
-2 tsp fresh thyme. dried will do if you can't get fresh, but the smell of fresh thyme is so delicious it's a shame to miss out!
-100g dried cranberries
-500g turkey breast, diced into bite sizes pieces
-beaten egg to glaze

Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees (170 degrees for a fan oven)

1. Heat the olive oil and butter in a frying pan or wok and gently fry the onions and turkey until nicely browned and cooked through. Leave to cool down for a bit

2. In a large bowl, combine the sausagemeat, lemon juice, breadcrumbs, apricots, chestnuts, thyme, and cranberries. Add the onion and turkey pieces and mix using your hands.

3. Roll out 3/4 of the pastry and cover the bottom of the pie dish. Now, squidge all of the christmassy goodness filling into the case. Brush the edges with beaten egg.

4. Roll out the rest of the pastry and cover the filling. Either pinch the edge or use a fork to seal the edge.

5.  Brush the pastry with the beaten egg to glaze. Use the off-cuts to decorate in any way you wish... christmas cookie cutters are always a good option. I quite like to glaze the top of the pie, but not the decoration, which gives a nice contrast.

6. Bung your lovely pie in the oven. Bake for between 40-60 mins depending on your oven, until it has turned a lovely brown colour.

Enjoy. Delicious served warm or cold!

A Very Exciting (and Secret) Development

I'm quite rubbish at keeping daft but exciting secrets, so I'm going to tell you all about this Top Secret and marvellous thing that is happening at the moment..

Inspired by the lovely Lisa, and the Clandestine Cake Club, my friend Nancy and I have decided to make our very own food-based secret society.

A secret pie club! Similar principles to the CCC, (you only find out about the venue 24 hours before, you can bring a non-baking friend, you have to make a pie that will feed 8-12 people), but with a more savoury option, although sweet pies are still very much welcome.

Our website is under construction at the minute, but i've started off a little blog 

Aaaand, we have a twitter account ( @private_pie)

Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we have a Facebook page as well 

So, once i am back from my holidays, we are going to go and have a look for venues. We have somewhere in mind which i think will be perfect, but fingers crossed that it all works out.

I am really, so excited about this!

Hayley xxx

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!