The Best Texas Peach Pie

is the one you are about to eat right now. This one has Texas Peaches, from Mexia, in June, I am behind in my blogging because now it's july They are not very big, but there are none better. Of course, I can't speak to the issue of Alabama and Georgia Peaches because by the time they get to Texas, they aren't good anymore.

I could see that I could use more fruit, so I added the few blueberries I had. Blueberries and blackberries are both good with peaches. I use a recipe for the crust, usually from Ken Haedrich Pie: 300 triedand True ..... blah blah blah I also like his Soup Makes the Meal cookbook.

Here it is with it's top on. Why no overall recipe? Well I like the pie on the cover of Fran McCullough's Best American Recipes of 2002-2003. It uses an all butter crust, and several berries, including strawberries. The recipe also calls for rolling the dough and assembling the pie, and then refrigerating it for an hour. It really makes the crust turn out nice. The photo of the pie on the cover of the book is below. This book series is very interesting as well, and I own several of them. But, anyway, they thicken the pie filling with tapioca and corn starch if I recall correctly. I don't use that tapioca anymore; it's gritty. Now I just use corn starch. Use a heaping tablespoon mixed in with your one half to three quater cups sugar and pinch of salt. That is a good starting point for a fruit pie, but I really don't use recipes much for the fillings except for the berry pie in the book below because

1.You never have exactly the amount of fruit they call for.

2.Recipes always call for too much sugar

3. Your fruit is never the same as the fruit they used in the recipe.

4. Rarely are my pies not good even though I don't try very hard, just hard enough to make a pie that I want to eat.

and if you are really tired don't peel the peaches, and Spenda is not as good as sugar, but better than no pie at all, if you have a diabetic in your family

This one was really good. It's hard to let it sit there to take a picture of it. It looks really homemade, almost rustic. You can usually get one like this only at someone's home, and a few special restaurants.

Colorful Coconut Easter Egg with Peeps

This is  how the beautiful the Easter cake from Martha Stewart Living Magazine looked this Spring, and my boys and I were inspired by the interesting shape, but we couldn't leave the all white classic color scheme alone. We had to have a little more fun, and substituted classic butter cream from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible for the seven minute frosting suggested in this recipe, but first we had to get the Egg shaped pan from http://www.wilton.com/ .

The egg cake needed a meadow to rest on. So we used the old colored coconut trick. We mixed green food coloring with water and spooned it over the coconut, and tossed it around.

The egg pan has rings for the egg pan to sit steadily on while baking.

Then we prepared a community of color for the egg cake to be with, and not shown are chocolate candy river rocks.

Daisies decorate the cake, and my son and I both tried, and learned to make them with meringue powder and confectioner's sugar as called for in the original recipe at the link below:


http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/coconut-almond-egg-shaped-cake?autonomy_kw=easter



Then we baked the cake according to the directions, using a scale as we poured the batter into the pans to verify we got equal amounts of batter in the two pans. I had to trim the rounded tops off, and this is actually the second try. As it turned out, they didn't have to be very perfect after all.

Here is one of my favorite Easter egg hunters.

And here they are are putting the whole thing together, with the grass, peeps, and chocolate rocks, with the final cake on the way to thier grandmother's house.


This is the cake almost finished with the meringue flowers, chocolate rocks, and pretty birds.
Below is our table set before the cake, with a pretty linen table cloth from our cousin Sheila Thomlinson, of Carlisle, England. The edge was knitted during WWII of sewing thread. Sheila knew that I collected knit lace, and was thoughtful enough to send me the cloth some time ago.

Maybe next Easter I can hop around in one of these Lilly Pulitzer Jeeps!