Cherry pie

I might say that baking pies is my specialty. I love to make pie crust, and when the pie is ready, it is so satisfying… Earlier I always made the dough from an old recipe booklet with an apple pie my mother used to make. It was delicious.

Then I started to look into baking in a more structured way. I started to collect the basics for every kind of dough. Every time I checked a pie recipe (not the American kinds where they start it with “take this store-bought pie crust, put it in a pie form and put the also store-bought filling in it. Bake it. Bon appétit.” Yes. I know I said in the intro that I’m all about easy recipes, but that is just lazy…), it was always a bit different from shortcrust pastry. Or maybe I had the wrong books in hand.

But the textbook pastry is 300 g flour, 200 g butter, 100 g sugar and 1 egg.

After a while I started to be conscious about what I am eating and slowly realized that you do not need that much sugar in your cake to feel satisfied. I had this little baking book where there is a “pie with winter spices and apple,” and it was the perfect sweetness for me. We calculated it, and it has 16% sugar in it. So that became the baseline in my baking.

My husband made a calculator for that. You can enter the ingredients and their weights without sugar, then give the desired percentage of sugar, and you will get the amount you need for the recipe.