De Baking Psychopath

Michael's birthday request: British Meat Pie . I used bacon fat for the crust. Best. Crust. Ever. Bake or Break always has the best recipes. This cream cheese and blueberry coffee cake was no exception. Another Bake or Break recipe: Pecan Cake . Fabulous. I used Greek yogurt instead of buttermilk and the cake turned out delightfully springy in addition to moist and nutty. Chocolate frosting was optional but delicious. I picked up some fresh figs from Trader Joe's and tried this fig and olive oil loaf cake from Tracy Shutterbean . It was dense, nutty, and delicious!

I have no pretenses--this is a very ugly pie. I had a lot of difficulty rolling out the dough, which wouldn't stay together in one piece enough for me to do any sort of crimping. And there's the issue of the top crust collapsing a bit in the middle. But the marriage of a crazy amount of bourbon (1 cup!) and apples was downright amazing. The alcohol from the bourbon had cooked out, but the full-bodied flavor remained and gave the pie a whole extra dimension. I'd used a combination of Golden Delicious and Fuji apples, and they still maintained some structural integrity despite some cooking and an hour in the oven--excellent news for me, since I am not a fan of mushy apples in pie. It was easily the hit of the evening, especially with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I still have a whole lot of bourbon left over from the bottle a friend left over at my house, and apple season's only just beginning...I'm thinking this pie will show up a few more times this Fall. Bourbon A...

There are many reasons why this pie came into existence: 1) Two gigantic cans of pumpkin puree kept whispering to me every time I opened my baking cabinet (they had been hastily stockpiled back in the Fall when I'd heard about the Great Pumpkin Shortage, not realizing that it did not affect my area...) as well as two graham cracker crusts, 2) there was not one single from-scratch cookie or muffin left in the house and it was starting to drive me insane, and 3) when given the choice between pumpkin muffins and pie, Michael chose pie. (I might make muffins anyway, shhh!) The cheesecake layer was...inspired. I was going to divide my pumpkin pie filling between the two graham cracker crusts, and I somehow intuitively knew (by my super ninja mental calculation skillz, of course) that there would be a little extra volume to spare in each crust, so I figured, why not add a mini cheesecake layer?? And because pumpkin swirl cheesecake is SO yesterday, I decided to keep the chee...