A very berry pie indeed!

We spent last weekend enjoying the gorgeous weather, we cycled down to Hatchlands Park via some debatable routes...We were almost trampled by the cows roaming free in the park whilst sunbathing and we enjoyed a few drinks at our local pub and the German restaurant.

Try to prevent any guy from ordering one of these beers! One litre!?!

Afternoon snack with Aspall cyder, it was very tasty!

 As the weather was so warm, I was dying to try out my new ice cream machine. Unfortunately I have no pictures as this was done in the evening and a combination of bad light plus exhaustion meant that I wasn't thinking straight. I wanted to try out a recipe which was fairly straight forward as it was my first time. I used this BBC Good Food vanilla ice cream recipe, I won't rewrite the recipe here as I followed it exactly so no changes to add. It did take my machine more than 2 hours to churn it though, not sure if the mixture had cooled enough.
Obviously you can have ice cream on it's own or if you like to make things complicated then you make a big berry pie...



I used a Mary Berry recipe for the shortcrust pastry and doubled the ingredients;
350g plain flour
30g icing sugar
150g diced butter
2 large egg yolks
2tbps cold water

I sifted the flour and icing sugar together, added the cold diced butter and rubbed it together to get the breadcrumb consistency.
I then added the yolks and water to bring it together. Once it has formed into a dough, I wrapped it in a cling film and put it in the fridge. Once it had chilled I rolled it out on a well- floured surface.

I used a spring-form pan so it was a bit awkward getting the pastry into the form but after a bit of gentle manoeuvring and patch work I was there! I pricked the pastry and blind baked it for 15 minutes in a pre-heated oven. The temperature was on quite low as I didn't wish to burn the pastry, it was set to 100c. I then baked it without the baking beans for about 5-7 minutes until golden brown

Whilst it was baking I prepared my filling, I used 450g of frozen mixed berries, thawed of course, and 300g of fresh blueberries. Yes, that's a lot of berries...
I mixed 3 tbsp of cornflour with 50g of sugar and mixed it into the fruit. I wanted my fruit to remain quite tart as the pastry and ice cream would be sweet enough.

I also sprinkled a bit of cornflour and sugar at the bottom of my pastry case once baked. I filled the case with all the berries and laid the "lace" (I ran out of pastry to make it thicker!). I then baked it for another 30 minutes but kept an eye on it.
The end result was yummy, I left it to cool and we had it with some of my delicious ice cream.

 

 

My inspiration for this was Heather's Deep Dish Berry Pie Tart, hers is absolutely gorgeous. I will attempt this again so I can get the laces right and possibly add more berries...

 

I'm having another piece now to celebrate Andy Murray's first grandslam! Well...any excuse to have more pie :0)

 

Ciao! x