Today I made my first apple pies ever, and they turned out pretty good too!
My friend called me this afternoon and expressed a desire to hang out; I suggested making pie. She was a bit skeptical that we would be able to successfully accomplish this endeavor, seeing as how her experience in baking is limited to chocolate chip cookies. However, she was willing to go along with the idea.
We consulted a few recipes and they all seemed to say about the same thing, so we went out and bought 11 apples because we wanted to make two pies. One recipe said we would need 6 cups of apples (per pie), another said 6 large apples, another said 7 or 8 medium apples, we figured 5 pounds would be enough for two.
We also doubled the recipe for pie crust.
We had so many apples, and so much pastry dough, that we ended up making 2 pies, 4 turnovers, a mini-deep dish apple pie (in a mini-loaf pan), and a mini-pie (that we called a tart, because we added lemon juice). After we pieced together the two pies, the rest of the stuff was just kind of thrown together, in a let's hope this works, what else can we do with all these apples, we still have dough left, where's the cinnamon, more sugar, what temperature should we put the oven? kind of way.
My friend wasn't very optimistic about our "extras", she was certain that they wouldn't turn out. I told her that this was what baking was all about, that experimentation was what made it fun, and besides, doesn't cutting out pastry stars and sticking them all over the top of the tart make it pretty?
I've decided that it's pretty hard to mess up apples, sugar, and cinnamon, even when you throw pie crust into the mix.