All Natural Flower Pies
As complicated as these all natural pie flower pies look to make, they are actually quite simple. First, get yourself excited to make a lot of pie dough— I made 10 different doughs for these pies. My basic pie dough recipe is below. Make sure to add 2-5 teaspoon of spice or dehydrated fruit powders (your all natural colorant) to flour and blend thoroughly before adding butter and cold water. You can add more coloring if your dough looks light, although you may get some streaks in the pie dough, but that is still cool looking.
Infused Pie Dough:
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 (or less) (25g)
3-5 Tablespoons freeze dried raspberry powder*
In a food processor, combine all the dry ingredients for the crust: flour, salt and fruit powder / spice. 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!
Now 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 at least 2 colors of pie dough for contrast. Or you can go overboard like I did and make 10 different pie doughs! Make at least 3 pie doughs. Put your rolled out pie doughs in the fridge for at least 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.
Now, make your favorite pie filling— I made a simple almond frangipane and sliced white peaches tossed with lemon juice and a touch of sugar. Set aside.
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 out of fridge and put in your desired filling of choice just so it goes up to the top of your crimped 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 your oven-- on the second to the bottom rack and bake for about 45 minutes 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.
*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!
Before baking
After baking
Don't hold back, go overboard!