On Sunday night, I baked the apple pie that I wrote about on this post. My husband was right…it is the best apple pie ever. (Actually, I wouldn’t know. I don’t even especially love apple pie. I’m more of a cheesecake dessert type of gal.) My husband Reggie enjoyed it though…and that was the point. Before he ate it, I asked him to say if it was good or great. If it was awful, I requested that he not say anything, but just go to bed. (It was late by the time that I was finished with the pie.) After a joking “Good night,” he expressed that the pie was really great. Mission accomplished!
As I was gathering up the various ingredients for the pie, I thought to myself, “It would be so much easier and less expensive to just buy a really good pie.” It didn’t help that the local stores didn’t have pumpkin spice so I needed to purchase four different spices (nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice) to make it myself! Also, because the lovely Laura who wrote the recipe is a true baker, she didn’t list the amounts of the various spices that needed to be combined in order to make the pumpkin spice. I googled all of the spices that she had mentioned and finally found the mixture at CDKitchen, which I promptly bookmarked! That was the challenging part. Everything else about the recipe was pretty straightforward. (One reader had asked how to do a “milk wash” too. That is basically just brushing milk on the top of the crust.)
As the fragrant aroma of the baking pie permeated our home, I realized why there is no real subsitute for homemade baking. The smells and the experience combine to make powerful memories. Baking reminded me of being in my grandmother’s kitchen. She would make the best apple pies, pound cakes and gingerbread (using Karo’s dark corn syrup). I haven’t baked with my grandmother in over 25 years and she passed away almost two decades ago, but the memory of the smells and the images are permanently ingrained in my mind. I just wish that I had written down some of those recpes to share with my little family today. I guess that I will just need to start making fresh, new baking memories of our own.
What about you? Do you have any special recipes that bring back memories of loved ones?