Sweet Apple Acres

So far away in the land of Equestria and the town of Ponyville, sits little Sweet Apple Acres belonging to the Apple Family: Applejack, Apple bloom, Granny Smith and Big McIntosh. 

 Now I know what you are thinking...Whats this obsessed Brony talking about My Little Pony for! And the answer is this:

 

YUP!!!!! 

AKA... Apple Pie... Or Granny Smith's Cutie Mark!

This was a joint effort between me and Andrew, and it turned out pretty well all considering. 

We used a simple recipe from the BBC, which I will Link here. 

So we started off with Andrew chopping a load of apples, we used a really cheap bag of eating apples from Sainsbury's, which was about 90p for 6. Andrew prefers eating apples instead of cooking apples so thats why we used these. 

Anyway so Andrew was chopping the apples up and then peeling them, its easier to do these parts switched around though, with peeling then cutting :P. As we were cutting up the apples we placed the apples in a tub with sugar and kept mixing them around to stop the apples going brown really quickly. We just used some ordinary caster sugar and a little bit of light brown sugar :)

Whilst Andrew was dealing with the filling, I was making a mess of a very simple recipe. Instead of putting only 140g of butter in, I ended up putting 225g... the measurement for the flour. So Andrew ended up taking over because I ended up making a complete hash of the measurements, but as long as you get everything proportional to each other its all good. 

After that instead of rubbing the mixture together to resemble breadcrumbs, I literally just chucked everything in the bowl and mixed it all in one. Just so you know, this wasn't intentional... I just didn't see instructions 2 and 3... I think tiredness got the better of me when making this. 

So, I mixed all of it into a ball, with the major measurement adjustments. I then floured the worktops and split the mixture in two (one for the bottom of the pie, the other for the top). We used a little bit more mixture for the bottom as we did not want the mixture falling through a really thin pastry. 

I then rolled out half of the dough into the rough shape of the square tin we were using. We placed this at the bottom of the tin and then used a knife to go round the edges to create an even edge. Whilst I started on the top, Andrew between munching on raw pastry (the weird child! :P) placed the now almost syrup like mixture of apples and sugar into the pie. I used the same technique as the bottom piece of the pie when plopping on the lid and then pushed the edges in so that the top and bottom would become more like one that two. 

I then scored the top with a blunt knife and made a whole in the top to let out steam. We popped this in the oven for about half an hour or so. The top beginning to brown off, is usually the easiest way to tell the pie is done. 

So this is the beautiful end product:

And let me just say this was mmmmm....
 The best bit for me was the pastry, I LOVE PASTRY :D
Perfect with a sprinkle of sugar and some good old Vanilla ice cream!

A pie, Granny Smith would be proud of :)