All Natural Flower Pies
Infused Pie Dough (1 batch):
1 cup all purpose flour (120g)
1/2 teaspoon salt (3g)
2/3 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into a 1-inch dice (78g)
3-4 tablespoons ice water (25g)
1-3 tablespoons of freeze dried raspberry powder*
In a food processor, combine all the dry ingredients for the crust: flour, salt and colorant powders / spices. Cut the cold butter into chunks and pulse in food processor. Add 1 Tablespoon cold water, one at a time, pulsing after each addition, until you see pea shaped butter pieces in the mixture, that is when you know it is done. Don’t over blend, your pie dough will be tough if you do!
Roll out your pie dough to a 1/4” in height in between two sheets of parchment paper. Set aside in the fridge. Do this with 2 colors of pie dough for contrast. Or you can go overboard like I did and make 6 different pie doughs! My suggestion is to make at least 3 pie doughs. Put your rolled out pie doughs in the fridge for 20 minutes. Reserve one rolled out pie dough to line a 9”pie pan. Crimp the edges, poke the bottom with a fork, and set aside in the fridge.
You’ll need to make one pie dough for the crust (I make this dough without adaptogenic flavoring) and roll out so that it is 1/4” thin and in a 14” circle. Line a pie pan, crimp edges and poke bottom with a fork. Put in the freezer.
Take your rolled out pie doughs out of the fridge. Using different sized flower cookie cutters, cut out flowers from your rolled out colorful dough slabs. This is easy to do if the dough is cold. You may need to make several trips back and forth to your fridge / freezer. With a smaller round cutter, stamp out the inside of the pie flowers and mix and match the insides of the pie flowers. The more contrast and variation of colors, the better it will look! Re-roll pie scraps between parchment paper and put in fridge and cut out more pie flowers.
Once you have 20 or more pie flowers, put in the freezer for about 15 minutes.
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F and make sure your oven rack is positioned on the second to the bottom rack.
Take pie pan lined with plain dough out of the freezer and line with parchment paper, then pour in baking beans. Par bake in oven on second to lowest rack for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool.
Make your favorite pie filling— I made a simple almond frangipane and sliced apples and fufu persimmons tossed with lemon juice and a touch of sugar. Set aside.
Spread frangipane onto the bottom of the baked crust and add sliced fruit so that the fruit goes up to the top of your crimped crust edges. Now place your frozen pie flowers sporadically on top of the filling. Vary the colors and completely cover any filling that you can see peaking through. Make sure the pie flowers are frozen. At this point you can also freeze your entire pie for up to 1 month.
To bake, put frozen assembled pie on a baking sheet and into a preheated 350 degree F oven- on the second to the bottom rack and bake for about 45 minutes - 1 hour or until the filling starts to seep out. Check your pie after 20 minutes of baking and loosely place tin foil to protect your precious pie flower topping from burning if need be.
Remove from oven and let cool for 20 minutes before serving.
*you can use any sort of freeze dried fruit powder or spices. Some of my favorites are: freeze dried blueberry, beet, spinach, carrot, kale powders, and matcha, spirulina, butterfly blue pea powder, turmeric, raw cacao powder, cocoa powder, black sesame seed powder. Please note that some spices are more mild in flavor while others will add a strong flavor, so use scant amounts at first and taste as you go. Experiment and see what tastes and looks good to you!
