51 pies

This morning I baked fifty-one pies. [adjusts crown] What’d you do?

Okay, okay, so I didn’t do it all myself. [reluctantly removes crown] The other bakers busted their butts ahead of time, making the pie dough disks and oat crumble topping and shopping for the ingredients and such. Then on Monday morning, my younger daughter and I went in at five in the morning to sheet out the pie dough and parbake the crusts. 

With all that prep work completed, when I went in this morning, all I had to do was toss the fruit with the sugar and zest and tapioca, and then bake up the pies, easy peasy. 

Even so, it took nearly six hours. 

The pies were a special order for a local program called shop-with-a-cop, where cops deliver meals to families, or something like that. I’m not really sure. All I know is they ordered 48 pies, so I made 50, just to be on the safe side. (The fifty-first pie was a Christmas Crumble — cranberry, blackberry, blueberry, red raspberry, orange, lemon — for the diner to sell by the slice.) 

To make the pie marathon even more special, it snowed!

It was magical, really, all of us bustling about making bread and croissants and pies and listening to Christmas music while watching the snow fall. The first time I visited the bakery, I remember looking out the enormous plate windows and thinking ahead to the snowy winter days when we’d be tucked inside baking up a storm. And then today happened and it was exactly as I’d imagined it’d be. 

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (12.16.19), croissants, the warming, mini dramas, the quotidian (12.16.13), here to stay, cranberry white chocolate cookies.