Pie!

so, my first foray into baking seems to have been a success. so, a little background. i am not a baker. i do a lot of cooking, stovetop, grilling, what-have-you. but, i have avoided baking, specifically pastries and desserts. this is mostly due to an unfamiliarity with the medium, and a lack of a comfort level. See, with cooking, i can usually just add whatever i want to it as i am making it; thee are no set ratios, or proportions to maintain, like in baking. when you bake a cake, you have to have very specific amounts of things, all in a certain ratio to the others. i am not comfortable with that, regardless of my scientific background.
however, i cannot say that i took a normal baking approach to this pie that i made. i did it to a much more spontaneous cooking method, than a methodical baking method. so it is kind of a good stepping stone to try more baking.

mmmm berries

i had a shit-ton of berries from work, specifically blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. so, i already had my pie filling. all i really needed to buy was the pie crust, which is courtesy of Pillsbury. the other ingredients i used were ginger syrup, nutmeg, and orange juice.

this stuff is delicious. you should buy it

 So i started by mixing together about 5 tablespoons of cornstarch with about 1/4 cup of the ginger syrup, and a pinch of salt. that all got mixed together, and then i added about 1/4 of the berries, to mix together with this slurry mixture. it will theoretically provide the thickening agent to my pie.

this is the gross looking combo of the corn starch and syrup.

the mixture of berries to the starch

the soon to be mentioned docked pie crust. it was in a disposable pan, since the only pie pan i had access to was 9.5 inches, and the dough i bought was 9 inches. wtf

This all got mixed together, and was added to my (docked) pie dough, which was on a pie pan. Then i went to making the top crust. I figured, go big or go home, so i made a simple lattice structure on the top, as shown.

not nearly as hard as the end result looks.

This had an end result that looked quite lovely, if i do say so myself. oh, and there is an eggwash on it to help browning.

after about 1 hour and 15 minutes, i had a positively scrumptious looking end result, that i am still waiting to completely cool down before i cut. but i do believe that this is a success, that shall lead to more baking in the future.

woohoo! Pie!