Hungarian Sour Cherry-Cream Pie – Meggyes-krémes lepény

You will also need:

1. A springform pan, measuring about 21 centimeters across the bottom (or about 8 and 1/2-inches).
2. A piece of parchment paper to line the pan.
3. Another sheet of parchment paper on which to chill the top crust and a baking pan on which to place the paper and crust while the crust chills.
4. A medium-sized frying pan.
5. 2 bowls.
6. A mixer, hand or standing.
7. A heavy-bottomed saucepan.
8. A whisk.
9. A pizza cutter or knife.
10. A broad spatula.
11. A small strainer.

For the pastry crust: Allow one hour for chilling the dough.

1. Butter the bottom and sides of the springform pan and line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. Cut another sheet of parchment slightly bigger than the bottom of the springform pan. Place the pan on top of it and trace around it with a pencil. Butter the traced circle and place the sheet on a small baking pan that will fit in the freezer. Set aside both the springform pan and the sheet of buttered paper.
2. Melt the butter in the frying pan over medium heat. Add the ground almonds and stir them about and brown them for a minute or two.
3. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flour. Transfer the mixture to a bowl.
4. Mix in the Kirsch (or rum) and the baking powder and set the mixture aside.
5. In another bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla until they thicken, become creamy, and turn a pale, white-ish yellow. Then beat them into the bowl of ground almond mixture.
6. There will be almost 2 cups of very soft pastry dough. Pour 2/3 cup of the dough into the traced circle and spread it out to cover the circle’s interior. (There’s no need to be precise about spreading the pastry exactly out to the edge of the circle.) Place the circle of pastry, on the pan, in the freezer and chill it for 1 hour while you make the pastry cream and form the pastry shell in the pan.
7. Put the bowl holding the remainder of the pastry dough in the freezer for 30 minutes. While waiting for the dough to chill, make the cream for the pie filling.

For the cream:

1. In a saucepan over medium heat, heat the milk until it is hot but not boiling. Then remove it from heat and set it aside.
2. Put the egg yolks, sugar and vanilla in a bowl and beat until they become creamy. Then beat in the cornstarch.
3. Still mixing, slowly add the hot milk.
4. Pour the milk and egg mixture into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook the cream, stirring with a whisk, over medium heat until it slowly comes to a boil and thickens. (This may take about 5 minutes or a little longer.) Set the thickened cream aside to cool to lukewarm and then place it in the refrigerator while you work on the chilled dough.

For assembling and baking the pie:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
2. After 30 minutes of chilling, remove the bowl of dough from the freezer. Butter your fingers, turn the dough into the prepared pan and press it over the bottom and about 2.5 centimeters (or 1 1/2 inches) up the sides of the pan. Put the pan back in the freezer for another 20 minutes. (The crust will firm up some more in the freezer and then it will be easy to even the crust out a little more and define the sides of it a little better before filling it.
3. After 20 more minutes of chilling in the freezer, take the crust out. With your fingers, even the bottom and rim of the pastry some more and then, fill it with the pastry cream and arrange a cup of cherries in the cream.
4. By now the round of top crust will have been chilling on the parchment paper in the freezer for about 1 hour. Take it out of the freezer. The dough will still be pliable and too soft to come away from the paper in one piece. But this doesn’t matter. With a pizza cutter or knife, divide the dough into 8 sections. The sections are used as a guide as you scrape off and flatten sections of dough and place them on top of the pie.
5. Butter your fingers. Scrape up a section of pastry dough with the spatula. It will not slide onto the spatula in a flat piece; rather, it will wrinkle and bunch up. Lift the piece off the spatula, roughly flatten it out between your buttered fingers, and place it on top of the pie filling. This step isn’t easy to visualize. There are photos illustrating it, as well as other parts of the recipe on the related link.
6. Repeat, section by section, until all the round of dough is transferred to the top of the filling, placing the irregular, flattened strips of dough in a single layer over the filling.
7. Finally, spread out the flattened segments of pastry gently with your fingers, until the sections meet and cover most of the filling. (But don’t labour over the crust too much. Placing a soft crust over a soft filling is not tricky so long as you realize that the crust need not cover every space and will not be a thing of beauty before it is baked. As it bakes, however, the sections of flattened dough will spread out and fill in most of the spaces, and the powdered sugar and almonds used for decorating the baked pie will fill in the remainder.
8. Bake the pie in the middle of the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until the top crust is golden and does not collapse when gently pressed with your finger. Then remove it from the oven and cool the pie in the pan on a rack. Remove the rim of the pan. Lift the pie gently to peel away the parchment paper, or leave it on the parchment paper and slide the pie onto a serving platter.
9. Sprinkle the pie with thin-sliced, toasted almonds. Sift powdered sugar over it and, just before serving sift a little more sugar over the pie and place cherries around on the top. Once the pie is sliced and placed on dessert plates, add another one or two cherries beside or on each slice.

A Note: Step-by-step photos illustrating the recipe are on the diplomatickitchen’s related blog link.

An Acknowledgement: Hungarian Sour Cherry-Cream Pie is adapted from a recipe in the Hungarian cooking journal “Konyha Magazin” (July-August 2001).