Hey! I said No!

Happy Thanksgiving my beautiful and amazing friends!! I hope that you’re all enjoying your time (socially distant, of course) with people you love. I’m blessed that I live with basically my whole family, so we get to celebrate together.

For as long as I can remember, which isn’t long, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at actual pie dough. So, I figured for my LAST PUMPKIN RECIPE of the season I’d do a Pumpkin Pie with homemade pie crust.

Here’s what you need:

For the Crust:
1 1/4 cup of flour
1/4 tsp of salt
5 tbls of butter
3-4 tbls of ice water

For the Filling:
2 eggs
2 cups of Pumpkin Puree (I used one 15 oz can)
2/3 cup of sugar
1 tsp of Cinnamon
1/2 tsp of ginger
1/4 tsp of nutmet
1/2 tsp of Salt

First, combine your flour and salt.

Then, cut up your butter into chunks. You’re going to want to use your hands for this part. You need to make sure the butter gets combined fully with the flour/salt mixture. It’s going to look like gravel and be soft. This can take a bit, so don’t rush it.

While I was cutting in the butter I had an epiphany. I don’t normally like the taste of pie crust, to me it can ruin the pie. So I added some Cinnamon Sugar into the pie mix. Spoiler alert: I didn’t add enough. Next time I’ll add like a teaspoon, but this time I only did 1/2 of one.

Anyway, once the butter is mixed into the flour you want to gradually add in the tablespoons of ice water. You really want your dough to be cold, so make sure you are using ice water and cold butter. There isn’t a picture of this because I wasn’t able to stop and take one, but once the dough starts to clump together and you can easily gather it into a ball, it’s done. I think it felt like slightly dried out play-do.

Roll it in a ball then flatten in into a disk. You can tell that this dough is really crumbly. I debated adding more water to give it some more stability, but I didn’t. Spoiler #2: it was fine. Wrap your disk in saran wrap and throw it in the fridge while you make the filling.

Add all your pie filling ingredients into a bowl and combine. Simple. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Smells like Thanksgiving heaven.

Flour your working surface and rolling pin. Roll out your dough. You want it to be about 2 inches wider than your pie plate and about 1/8 of an inch thick. I have no idea what that really looks like, so just roll with it… pun COMPLETELY intended.

Carefully put the dough into your pie plate. As you can see, I had some cracks that I had to push back together. It really didn’t matter, the crust was really good!! I added a little decoration around the sides with a fork to be fancy. You can do whatever you want, just do yourself a favor and take the time to do that. It makes for a very pretty end result.

Fill with your filling and put it into a 350 degree oven for about an hour. Mine took a lot longer than I expected, but you’ll know it’s done when the center has a slight jiggle to it and the edges start to crack.

I made it last night and by the time we ate it today it was so good. I was so very proud of myself!!!

I’ve had so much fun with this pumpkin series!!! I’ve learned a lot about cooking and baking and it’s been a blast being able to share my experiences with you. I hope that you’ve learned something too. Starting on Tuesday I’ll be exploring the rabbit hole of Keto cookies. I’m super excited to be able to make these creations and share them with you. I know that there’s a lot of debate about the Keto diet, and I’m honestly not looking to debate it with you. As a diabetic, I do lean a lot towards a Ketogenic diet. It’s helped be regulate my sugars and I feel a lot better on it. But that’s neither here nor there.

Thank you so much for joining me on my pumpkin adventures these last several weeks. You’re all rockstars!!!

With Light and Love,

Lissie