Summer-Fruit Birthday Pie Recipe!

Sunday was my birthday!  And in celebration I spent a beautiful day poolside with my immediate family and five closest friends from NYC, eating amazing food and laughing a lot.

Because of my lovely dietary restrictions, I made my own celebratory dessert: a Summer-Fruit Pie.  I made a variation on a crust from a gluten-free pastry class I took with Rebecca Reilly, author of Gluten-Free Baking (available in Jacqueline’s Store!).

The fruit pie came out delicious!  A flaky crust with one layer of fresh figs from my uncle’s garden, no sugar or anything added, topped with a layer of lightly sweetened and stewed ripe red cherries.  As fresh figs are hard to come by, any soft and light summer fruit works!  It was sweet and decadent and fresh and delicious without being complicated or loaded with… anything!

A little note: this was a celebratory splurge… I normally never use white sugar or sweeteners because of hypoglycemia and very low blood sugar.  So if you react poorly to sugar or have similar complications, forgo the sugar completely and have some sort of protein with the pie, like a glass of almond milk or a topping of yogurt.  The fruit is naturally deliciously sweet!

Jacqueline’s Gluten-Free Summer-Fruit Today-Is-My-Birthday Pie!

For the crust:

• Two cups gluten-free flour.  I tried Tom Sawyer’s all-purpose gluten free flour.  It’s made of mostly rice flour so it’s a little grainy, but it worked just fine and was easier to transport than my collection of flours and starches.  It also includes the appropriate amount of starch and xantham gum, so there’s no need to compose your own flour calculations, if you know how to do so!
• 1/4 cup sugar: this time I used regular white sugar cause of the absence of any alternative, but a raw sugar, date or palm sugar would also work well.
• 1 teaspoon gluten-free baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick of unsalted butter, cut into chunks
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Directions:

1. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
2. Toss the cubed butter in and mix with finger tips until it is fully blended and resembles a coarse sand or cornmeal texture.
3. Make a well in the middle and add the egg yolks and lemon juice.  Mix well with a fork or your fingertips.
4. If the mixture is too dry, add a half tablespoon very cold water and mix in.  Continue to do so, a half tablespoon at a time, until the mixture can be pulled into a ball.  Don’t over handle! It should just pull together.
5. Pat into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

For the filling:

• 10 fresh figs, peeled: if you can’t find fresh figs, use any local and seasonal fruit that’s not too sweet.   I can imagine plums or apricots working well!  Just peel enough to fill the bottom of the pie plate.  And if using plums, make sure they’re not too ripe or juicy.
• 2 cups of ripe red cherries, pitted.
• 1/4 cup sugar.
• 2 tablespoons fruit pectin: you use this for making jam.  If you don’t have pectin, any thickener like arrowroot or cornstarch will work, just add in very slowly until you  get the right consistency.

To make the pie:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.  Butter a 9-inch pie plate.
2. Put the cherries and sugar in a small saucepan and put on low heat.
3. Meanwhile, roll out the refrigerated dough and fit into pie plate.  Save the scraps aside to decorate the top of the pie.
4. Stir the cherries and cook until a lot of liquid comes out and the cherries are soft, about 8 minutes total.
5. Add pectin/thickener until you just start to see the liquid thickening a bit, or until the back of a spoon retains some of the liquid when dipped into it.  Remove from heat.
6. Put the figs into the bottom of the pie dish until they cover the bottom completely.
7. Slowly pour the cherry mixture over the top.
8. Take the rest of the pie dough and place as you like over the cherries, overlapping and crumbling as necessary.
9. Place on a cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for fifteen minutes.
10. Check the top crust of the pie.  It should be a tiny bit browned.  If desired, wash with the reserved egg whites or a tiny bit of melted butter, then cover in tin foil and cook another fifteen minutes.
11. Check again.  The inside should be almost done, so cook uncovered for a final 5-ten minutes.
12. Cool at least 30 minutes, so the pie has time to gel a bit.
13. Enjoy!

Note: To make sugar-free, substitute the sugar with 3 tablespoons agave syrup.  Or forgo the sugar altogether in both the crust and filling.  To make dairy-free, use coconut butter in the crust instead of cow-butter.  Start with 4 tablespoons and add as necessary until you get the right consistency.  Adding 1/4 cup almond flour might help get the pull it needs without liquifying.