Thanksgiving Pie: Sugarless Honey Pumpkin Pie

Contrary to my earlier pieatus announcement, I wound up making a pumpkin pie for thanksgiving. Here it is, honey-sweetened, sugarless and tasty. Also featured today: photos of Carolyn's cherry pie, with some photos of crust edge shaping and foil top-protecting.

Sunblock for Pies

Carolyn Walters has offered more pie wisdom, and I thought I'd share it with any readers who may benefit from it. The photos she sent speak for themselves, I won't try to take any credit or add any advice. The dilemma is: how to keep a crust-top from burning? The solution, in a word: foil.

In her words:

I have a couple photos on how to protect a pie crust while baking -- wasn'tsure if you already knew of this technique.  I was overcooking pie edges foryears before I heard about this. 

Carolyn's Top-Secret Magic Pie Crust Technique: Part 2

Welcome back to our instructional extravaganza, in which guest piemaker Carolyn Walters shows us her pie-making magic. You may want to check out yesterday's post if you haven't already-- we're beginning today's session with yesterday's refrigerated dough.

First, let's pull yesterday's dough out of the refrigerator so that it can warm up just a little (if it's too cold it'll crack instead of rolling out properly; if it's too warm it'll fall apart-- so we want to just warm it up enough to be handled). You can actually warm it a bit with your hands, being sure to rotate it and pay attention to the edges, until it's just soft enough to be malleable all over.

Carolyn's Top-Secret Magic Pie Crust Technique: Part 1

Today is a special episode of our series, in which we watch pie expert Carolyn Walters demonstrate her super-magic pie crust techniques, which she originally learned in person from renowned chef Madame Kuony in Milwaukee in 1981 and has been using to win local pie contests ever since.  If that isn't enough to establish pie-master credibility, here's a photo of her delicious rhubarb pie (of which slices were eaten so quickly that no photos of the whole pie remain):

Not convinced? How about a close-up of the incredibly flaky crust?

OK, now that we're all drooling, let's talk about how this sort of thing is done.