The wee one and I made an apple pie. Now, I’m not known for my apple pies. Scott is. He’s the prize winning apple pie maker. But the other week, Alicia blogged about ‘the grand duchess’ of apple pies made with sour cream and eggs and ever since I couldn’t get the idea of a creamy apple pie out of my mind. I had to try it.

You probably know this already, but when you bake with a small child you need to stop for a minute beforehand, close your eyes, take a deep breath and say to yourself, ‘this is going to be a royal mess’. If you do that, baking with a child becomes completely enjoyable. If you go into the situation in a time crunch or with the thought that you don’t want a messy kitchen it’s bound to be a disaster. And, it’s taken me nine years of mothering to figure this out, but if you give your child their own bowl and give them a spoon full of flour, or baking soda or, butter or what-have-you in their bowl as you measure out your own ingredients, you’ll both be much happier bakers. In this case, she made her own pie crust and rolled it out with her little mini rolling pin.

Back to the pie though. It turned out great. A nice alternative to our usual pie. We have a granny smith tree in back and those tart, crisp apples were really fabulous contrasted with the sour cream. The crumbly, sugar topping is so good. It’s a rich pie and you’ll know that after eating a slice, so call all your friends over for dinner when you bake this. After I baked it for the allotted time, I stuck it under the broiler for a few minutes to give it more of a carmelized top. While this doesn’t top Scott’s pie, it will certainly make it into my recipe box for repeating next year. The only thing I’d do differently is cut the apples thinner, like an eighth of an inch thick and layer them in like a gratin. They way I did it was cut them about a quarter inch thick and just dump them into the shell. That allowed for big ‘air’ pockets for the cream filling to go into. Scott pointed out that if you cut the apples thinner and layered them then the cream to apple ratio would be in equal portions for each bite, rather than big chunks of apple & cream. Make sense?

That’s the dispatch from this Sonoma kitchen. Take a deep breath, get yourself in the kitchen, make a royal mess and give this pie a try (recipe here). It’s fall, we need to make sure our ovens still work, we need to pair the sight of colorful falling leaves with apples on our cutting boards and we need cozy comfort desserts for our now cooler autumn evenings. Now get baking!