Can She Bake a Cherry Pie

Do you know that old song called ‘Charming Billy’?  Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?  It was a song I remember from my youth, apparently an American version of the Original Lord Randall Scottish ballad from the mid 1700s.  The original is purportedly a reference to a Scottish Lord in the 1300s who died suspiciously and is rumored to have been poisoned by his lover, an English spy.  Hopefully my cherry pie didn’t poison anyone but every time I make cherry pie I get that old song in my head. Of course the American version has a happier ending since we Americans need to slap a happy face on everything.

 

On to cherry pie.  I am not a great pie maker, especially when the crust needs to be blind baked.  I seem to get shrinkage no matter what I do (and no, this is not a reference to George & the pool episode on Seinfeld). I chose a recipe from the Pie & Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.  Now I love her Cake Bible book but not so much the Pie & Pastry version.  It’s not the recipes, it’s the complexity of how the recipes are laid out.  I chose the designer cherry pie and had to flip flop between at least 4 different recipes and instructions throughout the book.  And, if you don’t read the recipe completely (preferably twice) before you begin, you are bound to miss something – like, for instance, the open face cherry pie takes a lot more cherries and the crust needs to be blind baked.  I made it turn out but it ended up taking longer than any pie I’ve made.  My suggestion is to photocopy the pages you need and then staple them together in some sort of order that makes more sense.  Or, you could go to Lumsden and buy one!