Pie Party---Best Cherry Pie

Some people on Facebook and Twitter were talking about pie and how great pie is and how everyone loves it.  They decided to make today a virtual Pie Party.  I decided I just HAD to join in so there was a legitimate excuse to make pie. ;)  Cherry pie is one of our favorites around here, but I have swore off the canned pie filling if I can help it.  In searching for cherry pies on the internet, I settled on one from Food.com called Best Cherry Pie submitted by Luby Luby Luby in 2003.  The pie has a 5 star rating and all the reviews I read were great.  The pie was also a blue ribbon winner at a county fair.  I knew I couldn’t lose there.  And it called for canned tart cherries, which I had on hand.

I followed the recipe exactly, but when it came down to needing some lemon juice, I found that I didn’t have any lemons.  So I used lime!  Cherry and lime go well together and the pie tasted great!  I used an all butter pie crust, which is a recipe from my friend Paige for basic pie dough (aka—pate brisee).  This has become my go-to pie crust!

After assembling the pie with the top crust, it sprung a leak that I could not patch up.  So I tried dabbing the leaking cherry juice with paper towel and a cloth and it just kept getting worse.  So I finished up crimping the edges and slitting the top with some holes and baked the pie with its little pool of red on the top.  Sigh.  The pie still turned out nice.  I always put my signature pie crust cut out of what is in the pie on the top, in this case two little cherries.  Before baking the pie, I brushed some cream over the top and sprinkled it with granulated sugar.

My pie looks like it had a little injury, but it gave it a little character, right? ;)  This cherry pie had a perfect sweet/tart taste to it and is surely one I’d make again.  What I’d really love is to get my hands on some actual fresh tart cherries, that would be heavenly!

We had a great 4th of July.  It started with us waking up early and going to a parade.  It was perfectly cloudy yesterday so that we didn’t get too hot sitting at the parade.

The coolest thing at the parade was a big Star Wars float and a bunch of marching storm troopers, etc.

I think the look of anticipation on Sam’s face is really cute as he could see each float, band, etc. coming down the street.

We took it easy the rest of the day, then I made everyone going running/walking with me that evening before they could have pie and before we lit off some fireworks.

Sam’s first sparkler.

When Kevin was about seven years old, he disobeyed his parents and got into some fire crackers and matches and lit one off that exploded in his hand.  He has told the boys about how he really burned some of his fingers and got hurt.  He has not really liked fire crackers since and we have never bought any ourselves.  It has worked out fine in that we usually have ended up spending the evening with friends or watching a big fireworks show.  But this year, we spent the day by ourselves.  So Kevin ventured out and bought a bunch of things.  I think he was secretly really enjoying lighting them and watching them blow.  Shhh, don’t tell him I told you. ;)