Pies, pies, everywhere

Yes, I made homemade pies for T-Day. And not just the homemade insides with the store-bought crust, but the whole thing, soup to nuts (as they say) from scratch. It rocked. And they tasted amazing!!

I made a pumpkin pie (of course), and apple pie, and a cherry crumble. I only meant to make the pumpkin pie, but there was leftover crust, so I made the apple with that. And I also had the last of the fresh/frozen cherries thawed from last weekends cherry pie, so I wanted to use those up, thus the cherry crumble.

On to the kitchen extravaganza...

I made a pie crust from allrecipes.com that did not require rolling. (yay!)

The crust was a little wet and sticky, so I added almost a cup more flour. And it made a lot of crust, so I used a little less than half for the pumpkin pie and then, because I already had the insides of an apple, noticed that there was probably enough left for a top and bottom crust of an apple pie.

The pumpkin pie was the recipe on the back of the can of pumpkin pie mix. It was that big can of pumpkin pie mix plus a very small can of evaporated milk plus 1 egg. It was so fast and easy, I am definitely going to make it again. I baked it in the raw crust (not pre-baked) and served it with some whipped cream (NOT from scratch, although I have and it is so easy!) and it was heavenly!

As for the apple pie, I used the leftover crust, pre-baked the bottom about 10 minutes while the pumpkin pie was baking, then added the filling and carefully did roll out the top crust. While it was pre-baking, I did put the crust in the fridge so it would firm up a little bit. Worked like a charm! I did not crimp the crust all pretty-like because I had made the bottom on the small side and there was not enough left to do that, but I did fold the top under the bottom all the way around and made two vent holes on the top crust and baked it for about 40 minutes and it was perfect!

Then the cherry crumble. I had thawed out fresh/frozen cherries in the fridge that I wanted to use, so I just put them in the bottom of a 9" x 13" pan and then added a box of cake mix to the top, based on this recipe for cherry crumble and it tasted very good.

I did not top it with the butter and that was NOT a good thing. I was trying to be good, after baking all those pies, but the top did not get firm. Like I said, it tastes great, but the top is very powdery still, so DO NOT leave out the melted butter. Maybe next time I will just cut back a little bit....