a little time in the lab

Baking is one of my favorite activities. In a former life I baked sourdough bread every week from a homemade starter, and took classes on the art of hearth baking. Nowadays I don’t get to it as much as I would like (and when I do it is not as pretty, thanks to our tile countertops which make it hard to knead and roll), but I can always count on a little quality oven time at the end of the year.

This is the month of the pie.

When I first started being the pie-girl for the family dinners I was in a classics kind of mindset; apple, mulberry and peach, mostly. Then I slowly started branching out to lemon meringue and lattice top, and finally I stopped working with recipes and started letting my fantasies run wild…my “chocolate-covered cherry” pie didn’t turn out quite the way I anticipated, but the “creamsicle dream” (tangerine with vanilla meringue) worked like, well, a dream.

This year we are having a big traditional family Thanksgiving, with some special out of town guests. After giving it a lot of thought, I have a plan. Tonight I shop and tomorrow I bake. The pies? Sweet-potato mango with a hint of ginger, and blueberry peach laced with vanilla. And a batch of peach bars by request. Fingers crossed.

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