Maple Sugar Pie, mini Blueberry Pie

For Alicia's going-away a couple weeks ago, I baked, at her request, a maple sugar pie. Apparently, there is such a thing as maple sugar, related to maple syrup, but granular, like regular sugar. And you can make a pie out of it. One of Alicia's friends' moms had made such a pie for her years back and we were going to try and reproduce that experience. After some online searching (who knows what recipe Alicia's friend's mom used), we settled on this recipe from Farm Credit Canada. I mean, they sure sound official, right? The recipe called for authentic maple syrup and maple sugar, which I tracked down at Whole Foods. Organic, even. And Canadian. Well, the sugar. The syrup was from Vermont. Still organic.

I used my Mom's pumpkin pie crust recipe, which seemed more along the lines of what Alicia remembered than the flaky crust from last month's strawberry pies. It's a nicely straightforward liquid vegetable oil-based crust. The filling recipe worked out to be a layer of mostly syrup topped by a layer of sugar, butter, and flour. So, yeah, this pie is about 50% sugar by mass. Smelled so good while it was baking. Of course, come serving time, it turns out not to be the pie on which Alicia had reminisced at all. At least, the consistency was all wrong. Tasty though, if you can tolerate a gooey, pie-slice-sized hunk of candy.

To round out the evening with something a little less experimental, I used the frozen leftover pie crust from the strawberry pies and some frozen blueberries I had left over from... I don't even remember, probably some blueberry muffins from who knows when... to make a cute mini blueberry pie. Yummy, but almost savory next to the sugar pie.

Sugar.