Hate-filled Bourbon Peach Hand Pies

Making a Mess (from another dish)

Butter makes everything okay

Bourbon Peach filling

Stuffing my hand pies

Hate tastes good

I was sitting on my kitchen floor, bawling. I wanted to have these little hand pies ready by a certain time so I rushed it and it was a disaster. One too many disasters.

From the beginning!

The other day I wanted to do a puff pastry pie. The bottom of the crust never, ever fully cooks, not even when I reheat it. So with a little research I tried to er...I don't remember if it has a particular name, par baking, blind baking? Anyways, I was going to pre-bake it using weights to keep the dough from rising. Rice or beans were suggested. Hrrm, I had heard of using beans but not rice, so I gave rice a try. Ugh, stick to what you know. Puff Pastry is awesome because of it's flakiness, and rice is small and gets into those tiny nooks and crannies. I was like a damn archeologist that day, excavating my puff pastry with a pastry brush, sweeping away the rice. Eventually it all worked out. There were a select few bites that were crunchier than they should have been but I still call it a success. Either way, big mess. Rice everywhere! I thought the whole experience a bit funny, learning, humbling, whatever.

Than there was that Upside-down apple pie from the previous post where I over-cooked it, I ended up throwing half of it away, too dry.

For the Peach Pies I find this fabulous recipe from Use Real Butter. I am excited to give baking another try even though making dough/pastry scares me. I start all wrong, I freeze the butter and flour for only a half hour. I don't have a pastry cutter but had found previous success in using two knives, not so much this time. Hard work and with little results. I end up using my hands to 'cut' in the butter but obviously I know the heat from hands is making the butter melt, so I am already frustrated at this point, thinking that my pies will fail. I mix the wet ingredients and my dough turns out much too wet. Did I over measure the sour cream? I only refrigerate my dough for a half-hour (if that) and I flour my work surface like crazy since my dough is so damn wet. When I roll out my dough it keeps on sticking to the counter. So I end up folding it few times (a good thing?) but this is still taking way longer than I want it to. I over stuff my pies and when I fold the dough over there are huge gaping holes that I frantically patch up with my left-over dough.

I can laugh at it now but at the time I just felt like I was a mess, and I was. I had flour all over the front of black shirt and pretty much everywhere else in the kitchen. My sink was filled with the dishes I had used for the pie adding to the general chaos. I just broke down. I thought about the money and time that goes into baking and how I was going to have to throw this away. I hate wasting. I was convinced I was a shitty baker. And I am (kind of). I could be a good baker if I just took the time to do things right and have the right equipment. I know that cooking is an art and baking is a science but sometimes I seem to want to ignore that.

Case finds me in the kitchen like this, hears the whole story, and tells me that if I put hate into my baking than I will get hate-filled pies. So there you go. Hate-filled Bourbon Pies. Verdict? Hate tastes pretty good. We had a pie before dinner, I had one after dinner and for breakfast this morning. I like them. :)