Feast Cookalong: Croatian blackberry pie

After two weeks of eating out every night, I recently put my foot down and told Mr Ed that I wanted to cook, dangnabbit, not just eat. The concept that someone might want to cook is a foreign one to him, but, happily, he went along with the idea and even invited friends over to join us for dinner. This gave me the perfect opportunity to make the Croatian blackberry pie.

I’m not usually much of a one for pastry – all that rolling and blind baking – I can do it, but it’s not my favourite thing. What attracted me to this pastry was that you just push it into the pie tin with your fingers (no rolling required) and then shave bits onto the top when the filling is in (again, no rolling required).

The pastry for this Croatian blackberry pie was an easy food processor job and came together quickly. A chunk went into the freezer to chill while the rest got pushed into the pie tin – I didn’t have a ceramic pie dish so used a well-greased quiche tin with a removable base and crossed my fingers. Crust done, I pulled out the trusty electric mixer and whipped up the meringue filling – I’ve had pies with a meringue topping before, but never one where that was the filling and I was intrigued to see how it would end up – crunchy like a pavlova? Thank goodness for electric beaters – the filling was super-quick and into the chilled crust. A little knife work had pastry chunks strewn over the top and then into the oven. Note to self: oven needs cleaning after cooking two hams in two weeks – damn those smoke alarms!

My dinner guests loved the pie – the "perfect summer dessert". It’s quite light, the meringue filling is soft (rather than crunch) and the pastry is sweet and crumbly. The quiche tin I used worked well and made it very easy to serve (as well as pretty fluted edges). All in all a success – gee, I’ll have to stay at home and cook more often!

What’s your favourite kind of pie?

Editor, Feast