Talking about desserts for
our Christmas dinner a bit more, it was a very good chance to taste two different pie dough: one was classic all-butter
with ice water (for pecan chocolate); the other one was butter-vegetable
shortening with icy volka-water mixture (for apple). Both were tender and
flavorful; maybe one with vegetable shortening was flakier as it was supposed to be so. Honestly I didn't see much difference between them.
For chocolate pecan pie, I followed a
recipe from my favorite David Lebovitz's website (again!) with a few changes. I used light brown sugar instead of dark version, and reduced the amount by half. I also borrowed J's single malt whisky for bourbon. I like dark chocolate, so the chopped chunk chocolate in the pie was 70% extra dark chocolate. I didn't think anyone wanted sweeter.
To pair with the chocolate pecan gooey goodie, I wanted to have pie with fruit. J suggested something traditional, which meant "American." What popped up in my mind was simply apple pie. But since we would have two pies at once, classic double crust or woven top could be too much crust even thought the ingredients for the crust for each pie would be slightly different. So I went with Dutch apple pie. I checked several recipes and made up one.
Apple filling for Dutch apple pie is usually rich creamy almost-melting with heavy cream and well-cooked apples, but I used kinds of apples that hold the shape well and added lemon juice and zest, skipping cream to make the filling lemony chunky, make a contrast to the other pie. I knew I would make ice cream for the pies, which would play a creamy role on a plate. Also the
Dutch apple pie signature streusel topping added a crunchy nutty dimension.
My pie experiment was done as of now...
