Twice-Baked Cherry Pie

When I was a kid (not a kid-at-heart, but a real kid) Mom used to make birthday cakes for her friends. Between laundry & ironing and making three meals a day and taking care of the house, she didn’t have a lot of time to bake. A cake mix saved the day for her, and she usually made a yellow cake or a chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Nearly every time she made a cake (for someone besides our family), she would have trouble with it sticking to the pan and it would inevitably come out in pieces. She would do her best to artfully cover the cake with icing, while bitterly railing about the fact that “every time I make a cake for someone else it has to stick!” and how it always came out perfect if it was staying at our house. I would philosophically tell her that no one really cared as long as it tasted good and secretly wonder why it upset her so.

I suspect that Mom’s time constraints took their toll on her extra-curricular baking by causing her to hurry. Hurrying is a deal breaker in the kitchen.

Since starting a baking business last year, I have had ample reason to recall those early memories. An excellent example is a recent order for a cherry pie.

I consider cherry pie to be my trump card in the world of baking. I found a recipe many years ago that produces a near-perfect replica of my Granny Mitchell’s cherry pie—tart cherries in a sweet almond-scented filling, all encased in a golden flaky crust. I’ve never had a failure in a cherry pie. That is, until yesterday.

I planned to bake the pie and deliver it, warm and fragrant, to the restaurant. Everything went fine—I even took a picture of the pre-baked pie as well as the finished product, visualizing a triumphant blog post anchored by pictures of a magnificent pie.

Here is the pie waiting to be baked into glorious perfection.

What proved to be my undoing was the same problem that faced my mother so long ago—I got in a hurry. Baking is an art that should never be sandwiched in between appointments, and that’s what I tried to do. Poor scheduling caused me to pull that exquisite pie out of the oven before the juice, sugar, and flour had a chance to bubble into the ideal gel that encompasses and complements the tart cherries.

Here, the pie looks done, but the deceptive façade masks the watery filling beneath.



Yes, I said watery. Hours after I delivered the pie to the restaurant, I returned to deliver some other goods, and I happened to look at my pie displayed inside a glass dome. Where one would normally see a glistening ooze of lovely pie gel, there was a pool of reddish-pink water. Ewwwww. I snatched up the pie to take it home, telling the astonished but tolerant owners that I would bring them another one in the morning.

When I got home, Mom, bless her heart, took one look at the pie and said, “You just need to bake it a little longer, it’ll be fine.” So that’s what I did, and 20 minutes later the pie was fine and tasted quite delicious in fact. So we kept that one and ate it. I made the restaurant another cherry pie--took my time and baked it properly.

Lesson learned? Don't hurry--a good thing to remember about many things.

Bakery is still burgeoning.