Recipes

Is it blueberry pie, blueberry slab pie, or is it blueberry cobbler? I don’t really think it’s any of the above. No, this recipe ended up being some fantastic combination of the three—a love child of sorts—and, of course, was a complete accident. I’d set out to make a blueberry pie for Thanksgiving, and when it came down to the hour, naturally, I found the one thing you can’t make pie without, I was without—pie pans. Don’t know where they all went. Maybe I left them someplace, maybe my kids used them as Frisbees, didn’t matter, I was pan-less, sans-pans, what to do?

First, I thought, cake pan! Yeah, 8-inch rounds, that would work. The net said it would. Then my lazy side saw a picture of a slab pie. (Forgive me, you don’t get much more not-south than Alaska, I’d never heard of slab pie) “Brilliant!” I thought, “I can make both pies in one pan,” but then, I don’t prefer a crusty pie (doesn’t that just make crust-lovers sound dirty? Crusty-pie lovers?) so, I decided to cook my slab pie in an 13 x 9 casserole dish. After I’d made said pie, I found that the conversion for two 9-inch pies as far as cups of filling was not a 13 x9 pan, it was an 11 x 7 pan, but I am quite glad I made the mistake, because what came out of my oven was neither too crusty nor too gooey. It was this perfect balance of blueberry goodness, and everyone freakin’ thought I was the genius who did it on purpose. I certainly didn’t tell them otherwise.

Ok, that was sort of a long story, but come on, epic recipes need epic introductions, so how do you make this blueberry cobbler pie thing?

This pie uses a simple cream cheese crust.

Ingredients:

Cream Cheese Crust:
2 cups flour
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
8 oz. cream cheese

Blueberry Filling:
9 cups fresh or frozen blueberries
1 cup white sugar
2/3 cups flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. cardamom
1 tsp. nutmeg
2 tsp. brown sugar
2 tbsp. lemon juice
2 tbsp. butter

Cobbler Topping:
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 cup flour
1 cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
About 6 tsp. lemon juice

Instructions:

Start by heating the oven to 425 degrees and greasing a 13 X 9 casserole dish up. Grease it good.

Then you can begin to make the crust. Use our hands to mix the butter and flour. (You can use a pastry cutter, but really, using your hands is faster.) Add the cream cheese and continue mixing until you get a soft dough and make a ball. Roll this ball into a roughly 13 X 9 sized sheet on a floured surface. Then carefully line your pan with it. It’s OK if you have to tear pieces off areas that are too big to cover spots that are too short, no one is going to see the crust.

Now, you can make the middle noms, combine all of the ingredients above listed under filling except for the lemon juice and butter. Pour this mixture into your crust and then place little bits of the butter all over and sprinkle the lemon juice on top.

Finally, you need to top this masterpiece, mix the dry ingredients listed under “cobbler topping” in a bowl. Add the butter and use your hands to make it all crumbly. Spread this over the top of your filing, try not to let even a little bit o’ blue shine through.

Bake it until golden, this will be about 90 minutes. In the meantime, put the powdered sugar in a bowl and slowly add lemon juice until you get a drizzle consistency (not like water, not like paste, thick like a syrup but drips from the fork.) Drip this all over the blueberry cobbler pie’s top like a crazy, I mean just coat that sucker.

Cool and enjoy.

You can also use this crust and cobbler topping recipe for Dutch apple pie. Simply replace the blueberry filling with apple, actually use a pie pan, and switch the lemon juice in the glaze for sparkling apple cider. Note that these portions will make enough for two 9-inch pies.

When our sons 6^th birthday rolled around, I wanted to be the cool mom who brought in super-holy-cow-awesome treats for his class, sadly, the school’s policy did not feel that should be easy. All treats had to be low fat and healthy. I thought I was going to be clever and make Nutella covered strawberries, but let me just save you a tub of Nutella, the net lies. The oil from the hazelnuts causes the melted chocolate to slide off as it cools rather than harden like plain chocolate does. In a last minute what-the-heck-am-I-going-to-make situation, I ended up making tie dye sugar cookies instead, and they were a huge hit with the kindergartners, though I got shifty eyes from the teacher for breaking the low-sugar rule. Oops.

Anyway, let’s get down to why you likely landed on this tie dye sugar cookie recipe page in the first place, to find out how to make tie dye sugar cookies.

The base sugar cookie recipe for this is just off the back of my sugar bag. I didn’t come up with it, and I don’t take credit for it. It is however, a great just plain sugar cookie recipe if done correctly.

Ingredients for tie dye sugar cookies:

-2 ¾ cup flour

-1 tsp baking soda

-1/2 tsp baking powder

-1 large egg

-1 tsp Vanilla (I recommend getting the real deal rather than imitation)

-1 ½ cups sugar

-1 cup softened butter

-Food coloring of your choice

A note on butter: You must soften your butter on the counter over time. Do not use cold butter and do not use microwaved butter. Either will result in tie dye sugar cookies with poor texture.

You’ll also need:

-Plastic gloves

Directions for making tie dye sugar cookies:

Pre-heat your oven to 375.

Cream butter and sugar together in a large bowl. Add egg and vanilla and mix. Add baking powder, baking soda and flour use a large spoon to mix until combined, then use your hands (washed) to smash into a proper dough. (You can do it all with a spoon, but I promise this is easier.)

Separate the dough into equal sized portions for the number of colors you desire in your tie dye sugar cookies. I use 5 in the photos: green, blue, red, yellow, purple. You can easily alter these to meet themes, such as red, blue and then plain dough for white to make 4^th of July tie dye sugar cookies or red and green cut into tree shapes for Christmas tie dye sugar cookies.

Make each portion into a bowl shape in its own bowl, and then drop food coloring into the indention. The more food coloring you use, the darker the color will be. Put on gloves. You can do this without gloves, but you’ll have tie dye hands for the next week. Squish each dough until the desired color is reached. You may need to add more coloring.

Once completed, take a pinch of each color and roll it into a ball. Note that I said roll and not squish. If you over mix the dough colors, they’ll come out brown—kind of like an unsupervised kid’s finger painting project. Roll each cookie ball in sugar and then place on a cookie sheet. I recommend using the big commercial ones if you bake a lot. They allow for two dozen per pan rather than one.

Alternately, you can take each dough ball and create a tie dye log by rolling each ball into a snake shape, winding the shapes together and and slicing the log for cut-out cookies. I prefer the shape of ball tie dye sugar cookies, plus they are easier to roll in sugar.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until edges are set. Pull and allow to cool for 2 to 3 minutes before removing from the pan.