Pie

The crumbly cinnamon and almond topping gives this blueberry pie a sweet and crunchy crown. Serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for a scrumptious dessert that will make you nostalgic for the good old days. Although you’ll need only 1 crust for this pie, I’d advise against cutting the piecrust recipe in half since it will make it difficult to handle. Instead, freeze the extra pie dough. You’ll be halfway done the next time your urge for pie comes up. Make this pie vegan by using butter substitute in the topping and crust.

This refreshing apple pie is made with enzyme-rich raw apples and contains no fat. Completely fat-free, dairy-free, egg-free, sugar-free, and wheat-free—it’s totally guilt-free.

This delicious vegan pie was another wildly popular dessert at my market bakery. The crumbly oat crust goes great with the cool, creamy filling. And, if awesome taste is not enough to tempt you, it’s quick and easy to prepare.

Bananas and cream are a perfect combination made even better in a buttery walnut piecrust. Subtly sweet, this pie is a dessert for all seasons.

This is a new take on an old favorite. Dates add great flavor and texture to the creamy spiced filling in this vegan pie. The nutty pecan crust is the perfect contrast to the velvety smooth pumpkin filling. Don’t wait until Thanksgiving to try this one!

I know they say apple pie is about as American as you can get, but I give that moniker to blueberry pie instead. When I think of pie, I think summertime and blueberries! Every summer, we visit my father in western Massachusetts and go to a big field with the most prolific old blueberry bushes you’ve ever seen, and fill our buckets with heaping cups of blueberries. We eat a lot of them right then and there while picking, but the rest get made into pancakes, and best of all, baked up into pie!

As a Cape Codder, I’m crazy about cranberries. And “apple” was my son Lennon’s first word, so you know how we feel about them in our house! This pie is the perfect combination of tart and sweet. It is an ideal dessert to end any holiday meal. It is extremely pretty, with its tiers of fruit and deep golden crust. Look for firm, sweet apples to balance the tartness of the cranberries. I like Braeburn, Fuji, or Jonagold. To make this dessert completely refined sugar–free, double the proportions for the Single Flaky Sucanat Pie Crust recipe (page 130) and roll out as instructed below.

Banana cream pie was always one of my favorite desserts as a child, and now it’s a favorite of my son Lennon, too. The yellow food coloring is optional, but it mimics the lovely creamy hue imparted by traditional egg yolks in custard. Coconut milk makes a great vegan custard, and pairs beautifully with the bananas. If you prefer, you may use rice milk instead for a much lighter pie.

This is not your mama’s pumpkin pie! This vegan spin on the old-fashioned favorite is light, fresh, and decidedly modern. I consider this one of my greatest achievements in this book, because I was able to make pumpkin pie without eggs, and without tofu, which is the usual substitute in vegan baking. I much prefer this version of pumpkin pie to the one I grew up on, because it’s not too rich and is made without refined sugar, making it a treat my whole family can indulge in, until we’ve eaten every last crumb!

This is an easy-to-assemble pie that really takes us back to our childhoods. Blackberries grow wild all over Georgia, and coming from a family of great pie bakers, we were always motivated to pick them.

It’s bananas how good this dessert is! Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than this. A creamy peanut butter topping covers layers of fresh bananas and a tasty vanilla-wafer crust. Drizzled with a rich chocolate sauce, we think it’s the best in the bunch!

My favorite party dress is cocoa-powder brown. It has a crinoline slip underneath and I feel all dolled up when I wear it. I kind of look like a chocolate chiffon pie with a ruffle of whipped cream.

To me egg custard pie is an exemplary Southern dessert. Simple vanilla-flavored custard graced with a dusting of grated nutmeg atop a crisp crust is just what I would have served Miss Welty if I had ever had the chance to thank her for how much her stories have meant to me. I would have also thanked her for a gift that I have begun to appreciate, now that I am—for lack of a better term—grown up: the idea that you don’t have to leave the place you love and know, that it is not a prerequisite that to understand home you must exile yourself to gain perspective. No, she led by example and temperament. I hope she would have enjoyed this gratitude pie. I think she might have, with her keenness for custards and all.

The week of July 9, 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” bumped “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” off the top of the charts. That was the week rock and roll became king. This combination of Granny Smiths and cherries rocks.

If ever a dessert earned the adage “more is more,” this is it. Each and every time I serve this chocolate pie, piled high with chocolate-drizzled strawberries that hide a cloud of sweetened, vanilla-laced whipped cream, it elicits enthusiastic oohs and ahhs from my guests. They have no idea how incredibly easy it is to prepare.

Until I left Texas, I had never even heard of rhubarb, which grows in more temperate parts of the country. The first time I saw someone mix strawberries with rhubarb was when Cindy Crawford shared her recipe on The Oprah Winfrey Show. This odd-looking, sour-tasting fruit did not seem to me a good candidate for a pie so good that one would go on national television to sing its praises. But I decided I had to try it myself. I discovered a fruit filling with a beautiful shade of pink (lighter or darker, depending on the color of your rhubarb) and an invigorating tart-sweet flavor. At last I understand what all the fuss is about! Now as soon as rhubarb appears in markets, I begin to look for in-season strawberries so I can make this pie.

Monica makes the best, most intense fruit pies I have ever eaten, so good that her friends beg for birthday pie instead of cake. She keeps the kids happy while the pie cools with “whim wham”: While the pie is baking, take the rolled-out dough scraps, sprinkle them with cinnamon-sugar or fold a little jam inside, and bake until browned.

This is a traditional Southern holiday dessert, though the mysteries of its origins have been lost to time. Having had some less-than-wonderful renditions in my time, I decided to come up with my own ideal version. I went to the test kitchen with two things in mind: First, too much corn syrup yields a pie that is too sweet and runny. There is nothing worse than a pie with a soggy crust and syrup pooling in the pan where a piece has been cut out. Second, beating the eggs too much destroys the creamy texture of a properly cooked pecan pie. I am pretty pleased with these results, and I bet you will be too.