Eat Pie, Love Life

Right after Christmas I read a wonderful story in the Detroit Free Press about a woman who loves to make pies.

Linda Hundt, a Michigan State grad, spent the 1990s and more working full-time as an aide to former Michigan governor John Engler. She liked her job–but her passion wasn’t in politics, it was in pies.

While still working for the governor, Linda found the time to bake 60 pies a week in her church’s kitchen. She sold them from a refurbished food case on the front porch of her farmhouse.

She finally left politics in 2002 and a few years later, with the help of a home equity loan, Linda opened the Sweetie-Licious Bakery Cafe, an almost-too-cute pink-drenched shop in DeWitt, a small mid-Michigan town. There’s another branch in Grand Rapids and one coming soon in the Detroit area.

A national pie champ

Over the years Linda managed to win 16 first-place ribbons and one Best of Show in the Crisco National Pie Baking Contest, a 100-Year Anniversary Innovation award from Crisco and the Food Network Pie Challenge. She’s been written up in dozens of local and national publications.

I smelled a good Feed the Spirit topic, but it got even better when I went to Linda’s website. There I learned that she had also published a cookbook called–surprise!–Sweetie-licious Pies: Eat Pie, Love Life. I had to have it. And I love it!

A Valentine of a book

I decided to write about Sweetie-Licious this week because Valentine’s Day is upon us. Linda’s book is like a hardback Valentine, all pink and frothy, full of super-saturated color photos and gushing with love. If the recipes don’t make you yearn to sink your teeth into one of those pies, Clarissa Westmeyer’s gorgous photos will.

My daughter took one look at the book and burst out laughing, saying it looks like something from the 1950s. It’s true: just look at this photo of Linda and her mom, Joan McComb, opposite the book’s foreward. In the book at least, Linda always wears shirtwaist dresses (usually pink or red) with poufy crinolines and a June Cleaver-style apron. But that’s part of the fun of the book.

In her introduction, Linda, 50, describes how she got her start in baking with a Kenner Easy-Bake Oven. It was her favorite Christmas gift when she was 6.

The Easy-Bake was destroyed in a house fire when Linda was a young adult. Years later, Linda’s husband bought her another one for Christmas. When she opened the package, she said, “all the joy and love I’d felt from cooking and baking throughout my life came rushing back. I realized that my mission in life, my dream of changing the world one pie at a time and loving people through my food, all started from that little oven.”

While in high school, Linda made her first pie, coconut cream, for her boyfriend, John Hundt, who is now her husband.

Recipes and values to live by

After telling her personal story, Linda launches into the recipes. First there are recipes for crusts and toppings. One surprising detail: Linda recommends freezing the pie crust before filling and baking it. Another surprise: Linda doesn’t make double-crust pies. Many of her recipes call for a crumb topping. Other pies are topped with caramel, whipped cream or meringue or simple garnishes.

Then come more than 50 recipes for pies, each with a beautiful photo, and each with a story – about a person who made that particular pie or a person who really loved it.

The recipes are divided into chapters – not divided by the type of pie but by values Linda holds dear, qualities like Character, Faith, Gratitude and Joy.

All about love

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’ll tell you what Linda has to say about Love, in her final chapter:

Finding love in all things in life is, I believe, truly life’s purpose. A heart bursting with love brings happiness to all who encounter it. Love fuels us, and when we find the “loveliness” in everyone, the world is simply sweeter. Hugs, deeds words, and kind gestures are all expressions of this most powerful virtue.

But baking a pie for someone may be the ultimate testament to love, as the love you bake in it will be crimped into every corner of the crust and suffused in every bite of filling!

So if you haven’t already bought that overpriced heart-shaped box of chocolates or ordered a dozen red roses, consider baking a pie for your sweetie this week. He or she will taste the love.

A true honey pie

I chose Linda’s West Virginia Honey Pie for this week’s recipe because the title is so appropriate for Valentine’s Day and because I’d never seen a honey pie before.

She created this recipe in memory of pleasant summer days spent with her grandparents at their farm in West Virginia. Her grandfather, a retired coal miner, enjoyed hunting, vegetable gardening and caring for bees.

Her grandmother would make pans of cornbread that Linda would drown with Grandpa’s golden wildflower honey. “My daddy always claimed that we all should work as hard as honeybees, as he too kept bees as a teenager during World War II,” Linda said.

(Come back next week for another Sweetie-Licious recipe in honor of President’s Day.)

West Virginia Honey Pie

February 10, 2014

by Bobbie Lewis

Category Desserts

Ingredients

For Flaky Classic Piecrust:

• 1 3/4 cups flour
• ¼ tsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp. salt
• 1 Tbs. sugar
• ½ cup Crisco butter-flavored shortening, refrigerated, OR 1/3 cup shortening plus 3 Tbs. butter, ice cold and cut into small chunks
• 5½ Tbs. ice water

For the filling:

• 4 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 2/3 cup honey, preferably wildflower, buckwheat or clover
• 1 Tbs. butter, melted
• ½ tsp. vanilla extract
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 2½ cups half-and-half
• 1 Tbs. plus 2 tsp. cornstarch, sifted
• (Optional) 2 cups of fresh or frozen sweetened raspberries
• Confectioners sugar

Instructions

For the piecrust:

1. Mix all of the ingredients, except the water, in a stand mixer using the paddle attachment on medium speed swiftly until the crust appears pealike.
2. Carefully sprinkle the ice-cold water in the crust 1 tablespoon at a time, using approximately 5 1/2 Tbs. Mix with a fork until the dough starts to become moistened and just gathers together.
3. Pat into a disk, wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
4. Roll the crust out on a floured surface and place into a 9-inch pan. Shape and crimp the crust. Crusts don't have to roll out perfectly; just crimp over any imperfections.
5. Freeze.

For the filling:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Line a frozen piecrust with one layer of aluminum foil and fill with a layer of uncooked pasta.
3. Bake in the oven until the bottom of the crust is partially baked, approximately 8 minutes.
4. Carefully lift the pasta-filled foil from the crust.
5. Reduce oven heat to 350 degrees.
6. Whisk the eggs and egg yolks in a medium bowl.
7. Add the honey, butter, vanilla, lemon zest and salt and continue to mix thoroughly.
8. In a separate bowl, whisk the half-and-half and cornstarch until well mixed.
9. Mix into the honey mixture.
10. Pour into the piecrust.
11. Bake for 50 minutes or until the center is set. Cool on a rack and keep at room temperature.
12. (Optional) Before serving, add a ladle of fresh or frozen sweetened raspberries over each slice.
13. Powder the edges of the pie with confectioners sugar right before serving.

https://readthespirit.com/feed-the-spirit/eat-pie-love-life-honey-pie/