pie dough woes
"It's not even good yet!" Jane cries. "Stop stealing all the pastry, there's going to be none left for the filling! You're going to become a raw pie if you keep it up!"
"You're a raw pie." Jay manages, yanking his hand back out of Jane’s rolling pin range with a handful of dough scraps that he doesn’t deserve. There’s not even cinnamon on them yet, and if he’d just wait, and stop ruining all her plans they’d be twice as nice with the cinnamon and butter mixture she’s got planned for them.
"You're a delicious baked pie,” Carlos says earnestly, turning his huge and terrible begging eyes up at Jane. "You're perfect and hot and a harbinger of good things into all of our lives."
Much like a pie (baked), Jane is not going to melt under this pressure. Her butter has already solidified through the transformative cooking process, and she's got nothing left in her to be melted, even by sweet boyfriends with swoon-worthy puppy dog eyes.
She props her elbows up on the countertop, careful of the flour bowl she's got out by her left elbow to dust the minipie dough with as she works.
"You're very sweet, but if you eat any more of my pastry," Jane threatens. "I'm going to need to kick you out of the kitchen. And I'll feel bad about it, and then you'll be directly responsible for making me feel bad, and that's not what good boyfriends do."
"Lucky 'or 'ou--" Jay tries.
Jane dips her fingers into the flour bowl. If they're going to be menaces in her kitchen, there are consequences that all boys must face. "Choose your next words carefully."
Jay wisely chooses to swallow the mouthful of raw dough he's stolen from her minipie preparations before trying again. "I said, lucky for you, we're evil--"
Jane launches her handful of flour at him.
"Hey!"
Their kitchen gets morning and afternoon sun because the boys insisted on picking the kitchen with the high, wide windows. It means they need to keep the fans running even in the winter if Jane's doing anything finicky with cold pastry dough, but the sight of her isle boys drinking in the sunlight that spills from the windows most of the day is well worth it. The afternoon sun they've got right now is highlighting the flour stuck to Jay's shirt, his hair, his eyelashes.
"Oops." Jane says sweetly. "I didn't see you there."
"Beh." Jay spits. There's sort of a lot of flour in his mouth. Oops.She should probably feel worse about that. "Peh. Ew."
"I didn't mean for you to swallow it!" Jane cries, but oh, she can't help but laugh too. "I was just-- oh, there's so much in your hair, oh goodness."
"Janey."
"Yes!" Jane squeaks. She's doing a poor job at containing her giggles. Jay's eyes look so bright and pretty, even covered in flour. Jane's never looked so pretty before, not even when she's dressed to the nines and cleaned up and not covered in flour and buttery fingerprints from where they'd had a slight incident with part of the cinnamon sugar filling before.
"You really want us to stop?"
Oh.
"I mean, I wanted to make a nice dessert, and it's not-- I like having you here in the kitchen with me, but it's hard to finish the pies when you keep eating all my ingredients, and I had a tray for snails all buttered already, and--" Jane forces herself to slow down, take a breath. There's no reason for her to be anxious about baking. "Don't go away, but please stop eating all my ingredients. They'll taste a lot better once they're baked, and I really do want you to try the pies once they're done."
Jay smiles at her, flour and all, and Jane can feel the tense muscles all along her back relaxing without anything more than the small reassurance. “Okay. We can stop."
"Thank you."
“But you should teach us to make this dough sometime. It’s too good to keep it to yourself.”
“You don’t—“ Jane laughs, because she can’t stop herself. “You don’t even like baking!”
Carlos drapes himself over her side, careful and warm and comfortable even though he’s made of bones and dried spaghetti noodles. “Because we don’t know how. It’s not like we had the chance to learn as kids.”
“I’m not a very good teacher,” Jane warns. “I’m impatient. And you’re too smart for your own good.”
Carlos leans harder. “You taught me how to straighten my hair properly. That took a lot of patience.”
“Pastry isn’t quite the same thing as hair, babe. There’s a lot more butter in pastry, if you’re doing it right.”
“I’ll try putting butter in my hair if you’ll teach us how to make pie,” Jay offers, “you know you want to try butter conditioning. I’ll text Evie about it.”
“No!”
“Too late, I’m doing it!” Jay says cheerfully. “Butter—conditioner—thoughts? And send.”
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Apple handpies! Done with exclusively coconut oil/palm oil as the fats, and stevia instead of sugar. It turned out alright, but my unfortunate conclusion that too much medium-chain fatty acids just makes my liver hurt instead has been proven correct. :’) Ah, the food wars. At least my pancreas feels tolerable.
With that said, they’re better than I expected! Spices were cinnamon, black cardamom, ginger and nutmeg, made a pseudocustard base, and infused the oils for the dough with cinnamon, orange oil, and blueberry powder. I was half-expecting it to be entirely fucking wretched, but thankfully, the gamble paid off? Blueberries produced a nice saturation to the dough without impacting the taste, and the orange oil just gave everything a cider vibe.
I’ve got so much filling left! Half-tempted to scrap the dough, remake it and then split it to do specific designs on each minipie before freezing it. Vaguely visible in #2 are the flowers I slapped onto the center, with an eye towards tinting them a different colour later? But, spoiler alert: you will never cover up brown dough unless you want to break out the frosting or hard glazes, and I am absolutely unwilling to do that, lol.
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