More pies? Who is she?! Don’t worry, I also made dark chocolate cherry brownies to balance it all out. # 223: Swirled Cherry Nectarine Pie

I’ve always wanted to try making a swirly pie a la Loko Kitchen, and this week felt like the perfect moment. Her pies and tarts are literal masterpieces! Since I couldn’t get anywhere near her precision, I went for happy and fun colors to distract you. Is it working?

The silliest thing about pie crust designs is that they always look better before they’re baked. It adds a whole new level of anticipation to opening the oven door, let me tell you.

I only wanted one level of crazy (the design) so I went with a tried and true pie crust recipe. Check out my Cherry Apricot Raspberry Pie post for the crust deets! Best part: it’s super forgiving if you have to re-roll it a million times. No cracking and falling apart in protest.

I approximated the proportions of fruit to corn starch here and didn’t pre-cook the filling. My rebellious streak lead to a pie filling that didn’t thicken properly, allowing fruit juice to soak into the bottom crust that I had blind baked specially to avoid that exact issue. Pie: 1, Nicky: 0.

Corn starch is one of those magical ingredients that when mixed with liquid and heat can perform a viscosity magic trick. Heat causes the starch molecules to break free of their granule structures, get friendly with the water molecules in the liquid and generally cause chaos. A Fine Cooking article put it more simply: “The liquid then thickens because of the traffic jam of tangled molecules and also because the starch molecules sop up water.”

Lesson learned: pre-cooking the filling will lead to a cleaner-cut slice of pie and less possibility of a soggy bottom.

Stone Fruit Salad would be a pretty good band name, not gonna lie.

My pie plate speaks the truth.

Rustic edges are in, right?

I had a third of a container of ricotta left from making those Summer Fruit Hand Pies and couldn’t resist adding it in. While it tasted great alongside the sweet and tart fruit, it left white speckles on the fruit that didn’t look particularly appetizing. Next time when the ricotta mood strikes, I’ll stick to hand pies where less of the filling is on display!

Yes please.

Give a girl freeze-dried blueberries and a spice grinder and she’ll think she’s an artist.

But seriously, how cool is that marbled purple color?!

Freeze-dried mango and turmeric made their way into this sunshine dough.

Pasta or pie crust?

I used a cookie cutter in the middle like Loko Kitchen does in her videos and it definitely helped!

I always forget how alien blue and purple food looks. My own personal flying saucer!

Here are some gorgeous flowers for you since you made it to end of this rambling post. I sometimes have to stop and remember to take myself less seriously in the kitchen. Getting to play around with whatever ingredients strike my fancy is a joy! (Even when it turns out a little odd.) May you have as much fun this week as I did with crazy colors and flavor combinations.

Happy munching!