things i baked

I got a pie plate fairly recently (it's red!) and I tried my hand at homemade pie crust. I first made pie crust about 4 years ago, and it was such a difficult process that I promised myself never to force myself to do it again. No shame in frozen pie crust, I told myself. Well, a few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted apple pie. I bought a neat-o pie plate, found a recipe, and I was ready. I decided to just buy frozen pie crust, but I could only find the kind that already came in disposable pie tins, which defeated the purpose of purchasing a cool pie plate. So, I tried the homemade kind again. The trick, it seems, is wax paper (I vaguely remember my grandma C telling me to do this). I placed the ball of dough between two sheets of wax paper and rolled it out. I removed the top layer of wax paper, inverted the pie dish over the layer of dough, and using the bottom layer of wax paper, flipped it all right side up. (did that make any sense?) Then I removed the other layer of wax paper, and voila!, homemade, painless, pie crust.

I made Sour Cream Apple Pie with Streusel Topping. It was really good, not too sweet and really good with vanilla ice cream.
Last week, I made a good-bye cake for Drew. It was a chocolate pound cake (the recipe was from my CakeLove cookbook) with walnuts and an apricot glaze. The cake was not heavy, but it was denser than a layer cake. It was kind of like a brownie with a fruit glaze. The cake was pretty good, but not as chocolate-y as I would have liked. That's okay, it got good reviews.