I am pre-blogging, and it is my birthday. Now, I like pie, apple pie, specifically, far better than birthday cake anyway, but when you combine the first crop of apples from our tree in about five years* and Vegan MoFo, you get a homemade vegan apple pie.

I used the pie crust recipe from Veganomicon, but since I can't follow directions to the letter ever, really, I used Earth Balance stick margarine instead of vegan shortening, and instead of cutting it into the flour mixture by hand, I processed it in the food processor. It could have been a little flakier, perhaps, but it had a nice flavor and held together well. (I even got the first piece of pie out of the pan intact.)

I don't have the faintest idea what variety our apples are, but they are small, dry, cooking apples. I used the Apple Pie recipe (p100) from The Joy of Vegan Baking, but I substituted the Streusel Topping (p84) for the top crust. I also substituted Apple Pie Spice from Penzey's for the spices specified.

The result was a very firm textured, tasty pie. And as a special birthday treat, The Pickiest Vegetarian Kid in All the Land agreed to try some. And he liked it! The good news: he liked it! The bad news: now we have to share the pie!



*We used to have an apple tree that was about 100 years old, per our neighbor who grew up in the neighborhood. One afternoon about five years ago, I was in my office upstairs when I heard an odd crash. The tree had collapsed, and had done so into a driveway we don't park in. Nothing and no one was hurt. Eventually, suckers started coming up from the old stump, and we let them come, to see what would happen. This year, for the first time, apples!