Recipe: Apple Pie

Ever since I can remember, for every birthday we had in my family, my mother made an apple pie. When we were younger, it was always something we were looking forward to. The pieces of dough and apple we got when she was making the pie, the delicious smell of apple pie filling the house. My brothers and I are grown up now, but that apple pie on our birthdays is still something we enjoy. It’s become a tradition. Part of tradition is that things get passed on down the family and so my older brother was the first to make ‘our’ apple pie on his own. When he moved out, he even got a copy of the recipe to take with him. Since a few years, the task of baking the apple pie has been passed down to me. Whenever there’s a birthday in our family, I go home and bake our apple pie. My little brother has also made the pie a few times, but he’d rather just watch me do the work and get some pieces of dough and apple handed to him.
The recipe of our apple pie is no secret, but the book my mother makes it from is very old (it was my grandma’s before my mother got it), so I thought I would share it with you this way. I received my own version of the recipe when I moved out and now I hand it over to you too.

What you’ll need:

500 grams of self-raising flour
250 grams of caster sugar
300 grams of unsalted butter
2 eggs
about a teaspoon of lemon rasp
500-750 grams of apples
400 grams of raisins
some regular sugar
some cinnamon
±27cm diameter cake form

What you’ll need to do:
First off, preheat your over to 155ºC. Now wash your hands.
Then mix the self-raising flour and caster sugar together.

Cut the butter in small pieces and add them to the mixture. Knead it until you’ve scattered them through the dry ingredients. This doesn’t have to be very precise yet.

Now crack the two eggs into a separate bowl and add the lemon rasp. You can add more or less than a teaspoon of lemon rasp. I like it, so I would add more if the pie was just for me, but my family doesn’t.

Mix the lemon rasp and eggs together and then add them to your butter mixture. Knead it all together until you are able to form a ball of the dough. In the beginning, it will look like it’s never going to come together, but it will.

Cover the ball with some cling film and set it aside in the fridge.

Now we’re moving on to the apples.
Remove the skin and grate them.

If you don’t own a grater, you can just cut them into small pieces. Grease your cake from and get the dough out of the fridge. Cut one-third off the ball and put it back in the fridge.

Use the other two-thirds of dough to cover the bottom and sides of the cake form. After that, get your apple, raisins, sugar and cinnamon close by.
Use one hand to scoop half of the raisins and half of the apple in the cake form.

Use your other (clean) hand to sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon over the apples. Repeat this process once and after that, get out the one-third of dough you still have in the fridge.

Form a ‘string’ of dough between your hands and put it right on top of the layer of dough you had on the sides. It should cover a little bit of the sugar and cinnamon, with about a centimetre or so. If you use up all of your dough this way, that’s fine. You’re more likely to have some dough left, though.
With this, you can ‘draw’ something in the middle of the pie. It could be someone’s age of just a random image, like a tree leaf. It’s just for decorating (and for deliciousness). Put the pie in the oven for 45-55 minutes. After it’s done, set it out to cool (though I would also recommend eating it warm and with some ice cream or whipped cream).