Remember how I said that I was going to bake pie again this week for a dinner I am going to?

Success! I made three!

And now it’s late and I have to be up early, so I must sleep.

It’s known far and wide, or at least in certain circles, that I loves me some pie. And who doesn’t, really? Pie is fantastic. It’s fruit covered in sugar and sandwiched between tasty tasty pastry.

I’ve never really been any good at it though. Probably from lack of practice. My mother had insisted that I learn to cook when I was a kid so that I could fend for myself —then and now— but not so much with the baking.

That was fine though, she baked and it was always good. Great, in point of fact. But since I’m not able to enjoy my mothers baking anymore I decided to learn a few things for myself, starting with my favourite: apple pie.

Baking isn’t like cooking at all. I like cooking because I can improvise and make changes on the fly and make things better by adding something here or leaving something out there. Baking is a precision art, everything has to be exactly right or it simply doesn’t work. That’s a bit daunting for me, and always has been. But with the guidance of my sister, who is far more talented in the kitchen than I am in any capacity, I was able to make enough pastry for four pies and I-didn’t-count-how-many butter tarts.

The interesting, and probably obvious, thing was that while the pastry was quite precise (proportions must be pretty exact, water must be ice cold, whole thing must he handled as little as possible) the filling bit is stupid easy. Cup up apples. Mix together the appropriate amount of flour, sugar and cinnamon, then mix it all in with the apples and you’re done.

I did make one minor mistake in that I mixed up enough of the sugar-flour-cinnamon coating for 6 pies worth of apples and used it on only 4 pies worth of apples, so things turned out a bit sweet, but you know what? Not in a bad way.

Plus, the whole house smelled amazing for a few hours afterward.

The true test will be that I’ve offered to make pie for dessert at the Christmas dinner I’ve been invited to on Christmas Day, so I have to do it all again completely solo this week. If that works out, and I honestly think it will, then I’ll deem the task of learning to bake a pie a success.