WWPDD?

That is, What Would Paula Deen do?

I've never been the biggest fan of Paula's food, if only because her food hinges on the fact that it's your down-home Southern cookin' with no g. And cookin' includes copious amounts of butter, eggs, lard, cheese, cream, and anything else that's probably terrible for you, obviously not vegan/vegetarian, and delicious enough that suddenly selling your soul for that last piece of pie doesn't seem like such a horrible trade off. To whit, my grandfather is convinced Paula Deen is trying to personally kill him in a slow, methodical manner with her delicious down home cookin'. This might be true for all of us, but at least the road to our deaths will be littered with apple fritters, cheesy casseroles, and deep-fried everything you could ever want! Woooo!

Gingerbread Apple Crumb Topping Pie

When I think of fall, I think of the following things in the following order:
1. That weird fall smell that's very distinct but that you can't really describe, but I know you totally know what I'm talking about
2. Pies both apple and pumpkin
3. Time to bust out my scarves again, yay!
4. Leaf piles
5. It's finally seasonally appropriate to have hot soups again, yay!

Today's blog post will focus on the second thought, surprisingly enough. I know you're just having a heart attack with surprise right now that I'm going to talk about pie today, because I totally never ever talk about it.

This? Never.

Strawberry-Mango Pie

Do you see that there? The above picture? What does that look like to you? Delicious, perfect, awesome pie, right? Now scroll down a few entries and take a look at that failurepie. This, my friends, is why you don't try to help your sexy awesome ex-girlfriend (who has great hair, by the way, just throwing that out there) do a basketweave pie crust and claim to know what you're doing. Because you don't, because LOOK AT THAT UP THERE. Just LOOK at how AMAZING that basketweave looks. That is how it is done, my friends. That pie is a thing of beauty and grace that could have only been crafted by the hands of an angel such as myself. I mean --

Does that basketweave not bring a tear to your eye? Does it not want to make you weep like a little schoolgirl with pigtails and a pink backpack? I'm thinking it does, so don't lie.

Vegan Caramel-Apple Pie with Gingerbread Crust

There is something about my pies that I need to work the kinks out of, so to speak. My pie crusts have often not held up like a proper pie. A proper slice holds its own, not collapsing in on itself when you're trying to take a particularly attractive picture of it, right? I need to work on that. My pies taste good, but they don't look good, and if I want people to eventually buy this stuff, I need to tweak the recipes so that these pies look as good as they taste.
My pie just doesn't hold its own. I tried to pretend it was cobbler (shhh! don't tell it's really just attractiveness-impaired pie). I also had someone assisting with this pie who wanted to show me that he could make a basketweave pie crust top. Whether or not he succeeded is up to you to decide.
Also, I need to replace some light bulbs in the kitchen. It is not doing these pictures of my pie slash cobbler any favors.
But anyway...on to the actual pie.

Vegan Cranberry-Pear Pie

I am having a very hard time deciding how I am going to organize the menu for the bakery. This makes sense, considering how anal I am. I just got a new wallet today, and deciding how to organize my stuff in it has been driving me nuts. There are too many different compartments, and I the stuff I have doesn't organize into the compartments properly. Frustration.

 Anyway, so I've been throwing around ideas for the bakery menu, and it's giving me trouble. Should I separate it by baked good type (breakfast, breads, desserts), or by specialized type of good (regular, vegan, gluten-free, vegan and gluten-free)? Should I only offer specific combinations of dessert, or offer different crusts/fillings/cakes/frostings etc. and for orders let people put together whatever they want? I could also just have a menu of desserts and specify what they were available in, whether it be vegan, gluten-free, both, or neither. I'm beginning to lean towards doing it by make-your-own, at least for the desserts, since there are so many specialized types of goods, and then I could make menu suggestions and then just bake whatever combination I wanted on whatever given day depending on how I felt.
Let me know what y'all would think, plz.
Anyway, here is my pear-cranberry pie with almond crust. The recipe I used actually had so much leftover filling that I made another open-face pie with an oat crust. Overall the feedback was pretty positive. People also thought the pear was actually apple at first, but most people figured it out after a few bites. I think next time I will add more cranberries and less pear, because while it was good, I felt it was bordering on apple-pie-like, and I'd prefer for it to have more of a punch than apple pie. The only criticism was that a crispier crust would have been good. I covered it with tin foil for the first two thirds of the baking time, so next time I'll lower that time or not do tinfoil all together.