Apple Pie : Mistakes that you can avoid...

I have been working on sugar cookies for the past few months. I have been researching a lot on it and baking trays of these cookies with different recipes. I am almost there getting the perfect sugar cookies recipe and once I am satisfied with the final recipe I will post it up and share with you my experiences.

Now the weird thing is that the more I am into this sugar cookies thingy the more I crave to make pie dough from scratch and eat home made apple pie!! Nope, I am not pregnant with number 3 and I find this urge and craving is totally absurd and unexplainable!!

So, I bought apples and made the pie dough couple days ago. The pie dough was sitting in the fridge for two days and though I have this very disturbing pain at my lower back, being stubborn I decided to bake an apple pie while the kids are taking their afternoon nap. I didn't have a pie dish so I took a risk to use a tart dish which can easily tear the pie dough (which happened) to bake the apple pie.

The crust was heavenly flaky and flavourful. I use a ratio of 2:1 for butter and shortening and that gives the pie great texture and flavour. I would love to bake this pie again using this recipe but I would put more effort to work on the dough next time.

Mistakes that I made that you can avoid...
1. You definitely have to chill the dough for at least an hour. As you are working on the dough and it turns too soft in between pls put in the freezer for 10 -15 minutes to chill it again. The ingredient to success is to be patient which my desperation fails me for this process:P

2. Do not roll the dough too thin as it can tear easily. Ensure that the dough is rolled out about 3" bigger than you dish size. I rolled it far too thin and big and when I flipped it over the tart dish it torn :( . Partly this was due to the wrong dish I used. So lesson no. 2 is to get the measurement and item correct.

3. Do not throw your dough or stop there if you ever had difficulties or problem rolling out a nice smooth dough into a pie dish. My dough torn twice (after I chilled it and rerolled it two times) and honestly I was discouraged at the point. Thank goodness, I never gave up. I chilled the dough longer in the freezer this time and yet it didn't work so well for me in this third attempt :(. So finally I used the egg tart making method to push the dough up from the centre to the edge of the tin and patched wherever was torn. Well this is definitely not an acceptable method for a prof baker but it isn't too bad an idea if you are working on a tart dish. The ingredient to success for this mistake is to be persistent.

4. More juice meaning messiness for presentation but it is absolutely tastier and finger licking good for apple pie! I chose the latter so you can see plenty of juice oozed out from the pie which I wanted. However the centre pie was dry so perhaps pouring in the juice from the centre (which I did the opposite) and let it flow by itself to the edge will resolve the problem?!

This is definitely a very delicious pie that I will make again by avoiding the above mistakes. The next time if I were to bake this again, I will try to bake it on small tart tin and see what are the results.