A Feast for the Fourth -- Part Two

I thought dessert warranted its own post. I made the apple pie that I'm thinking of making for next week's pie competition that I've entered to try and work out any kinks in advance.

My mom always makes sour cream apple pie to go with our Thanksgiving dinner, and it's delicious. Since Matt and I sometimes do Thanksgiving on our own, I've made the pie several times, though this time I couldn't find my copy of the recipe, torn out of a magazine a billion years ago. I think, however, that it is this recipe from Gourmet, so that's the one I made for the 4th.

First, I assembled the crust. As always, I'm horrible with crusts. I had trouble with this recipe especially, though. Does anyone have a really good crust recipe they want to share with me?

I still can't find my rolling pin, so after the dough had cooled in the fridge for about an hour I just pressed it into my pie pan.

Next up, the apple filling. This is the best part of the pie. Each apple slice is lovingly coated in deliciousness. The recipe always makes too much and I'm always happy to eat the leftover filling, despite the fact that there is uncooked egg in it.

Pour the filling into the pie crust and crumble the topping on. My topping didn't really crumble, most likely because I didn't fully read the recipe in advance and then had to melt the butter instead of having softened butter to use. And yes, it kind of looks like little pieces of bacon are covering my pie.

Then cook. This smells amazing while baking.

I paired it with this ice cream but instead of using whole milk I substituted skim, since that's what I had in the fridge. It was delish.

The pie was really good, but I don't think it's prefect yet. I really need to track down a better crust recipe -- this was a little doughier than I like. Also, next time around I'm going to amp up the spices in the filling and maybe add some nutmeg. Wish me luck!