Save Your Fork....There's Pie...

It all started with my friend, Gloria, mentioning that she had raspberries in her backyard. Wild raspberries.

And then I mentioned that raspberry pie was one of our absolute favourite pies.

A 'baking date' was on.

A day to go to her place, pick raspberries, and then make pies. We decided to make little hand pies {tarts] since we thought single serving baked goods were the way to go.

On the pre-planned day, we arrived at her house and headed to the backyard to pick our raspberries. {And let me tell you...the skeeters in that berry patch were thick.} The berries, unfortunately, looked as though they had been well picked over. So we started picking anyway. We  picked for a good 20 minutes when Hunter came over to dump her little bowl of berries into my bigger bowl.

She poured about 8 berries into my bowl.  And then we laughed like 2 fools between the bushes.

So we continued, our prize being the fresh baked pie we would make later, and after a good 45 minutes, we had a scant two cups of berries.

Then we headed to Gloria's kitchen and decided to mix our raspberries with blueberries so we could make more tarts. We mixed up our pastry....we used the recipe on the back of the Tenderflake tub. In my opinion, it's the best. It makes pastry that is flaky and tender. Then we cut circles and placed them into muffin tins for our little hand pies. The berries were mixed with 1/2 cup of flour and a cup of sugar to make them into a bit of a thicker filling.

Hunter loves to roll pastry, so she took over this job. She also cut out the little pastry stars for decoration. Gloria and I looked after putting the pastries into the tins and filling them with fruit, and adding the star and the sanding sugar.

When we ran out of the raspberry/blueberry mix, we decided to mix up some strawberries and peaches to make more tarts....until the pastry was all used.

There is nothing better than fresh-baked pies out of the oven.  And when you don't make homemade pies often, the smell and taste is heavenly.

The sweet reward of our day....a fresh baked pie and a cup of tea.

Our baking 'date' was so fun! We plan to do another day soon.