Chai Pie

One of my favorite pies so far, the Chai Cream Pie. Made for friends. It came out quite good.

Originally posted a little while ago here, with the original recipe found here. As usual, I used the Four & Twenty Blackbirds crust recipe first mentioned here.

And, now... pictures.

My shell, nicely shaped for once.

The spice mix. If I do this again, the one change I'll make is to keep the teabags in the entire time the milk is heating; the resulting pie was not very tea-flavored, leaving something like a pumpkin-pie flavor (with lots of cardamom and no pumpkin) instead of something actually like chai. I'd also skip the cooling-down phase, since cooling & reheating the milk seems to be just asking for the milk to coagulate into disgusting chunks. I mostly avoided that this time by vigorous whisking, but it'd be better I think not even to bother with the cooling down phase but maybe to just use a lower heat for longer.

The egg mixture:

All together:

Cooling the mixture in an ice bath:

The fully baked shell. Note how much it shrank. (I think I need more beans or some alternate pie weight system). The middle also got very puffy despite aggressive fork-poking. Still, all in all, this was among my best pie crusts yet.

And, served for friends with homemade whipped cream (laced with vanilla, powdered ginger and lots of cinnamon). (Thanks to Ryan for the photos!)