Baking Bites An award winning food and baking blog featuring recipes, tips and more

Pie crust is typically made with just a few ingredients: flour, water, salt and fat. The fat is usually butter or shortening, and occasionally a little bit of sugar or cinnamon makes its way into the crust for flavor. It’s a simple recipe and it should be simple to make, but the reality is that it can be tricky to make a perfectly flaky pie ... Read More »

As much as I love a classic pumpkin pie, I am always on the lookout for ways to spice it up. Pumpkin pie can get boring after a while, particularly if you have a dozen of them in just a couple of weeks during the fall pie season between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Fortunately, pumpkin goes with all kinds of different flavors and just by tweaking ... Read More »

I don’t see plums in baked goods as often as I see apples, peaches, pears and other fruits. This is a shame because plums are amazing fruits to bake with. They’re sweet and flavorful, hold their shape nicely after they’ve been baked, and they turn such a beautiful color that desserts that use them are often simply stunning to look at. One of my favorite ... Read More »

A classic key lime pie is made with sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks and lots of fresh key lime juice. In the original recipe, the pie is unbaked and relies on the acid from the lime juice to “cook” the egg yolks and thicken the pie. It works well, but because of concerns with having uncooked eggs in the pie, most key lime pies are ... Read More »

As much as I love pie, I don’t like to compromise on the qualities that I think make up a great one. For instance, I think a pie has to have a good crust that is a blend of flaky and tender. I also think that that crust should be well browned when it comes out of the oven, not pasty looking. And when it ... Read More »

Ever since I got back from judging the Crisco 2010 National Pie Championships, I’ve been getting requests for recipes for Lemon Swirl Cream Cheese Pie, the pie that took home the best in show prize. The American Pie Council has posted the recipe on their site, but I couldn’t resist making it myself at home. The pie is basically a cheesecake, with a cream cheese ... Read More »

Chess pie is a dessert that doesn’t give anything away in its name. It’s a Southern classic pie with a custard base made up of eggs, butter and sugar. So far as I can tell, there is no one standard version of the chess pie and I’ve had many variations of it before, some that had a very dense, sweet, eggy filling and some that ... Read More »

While there is nothing like a full-sized cake or pie, there is something very appealing about little desserts. They’re cute – a shrunken down version of their full-sized cousins – and can pack in a lot of flavor. Best of all, you can usually eat more than one without feeling guilty. So I’m easily tempted by miniature versions of desserts, and when I saw a ... Read More »