Sophia's jam pie

It is a recipe I got from my mother, and in her turn, she got it from her colleague, Sophia. Original recipe did not use almonds to top it; I added it once after forgetting to leave some pastry to do top crumbles and really liked how it turned out. Also original recipe did not require a plum jam specifically, but I like it best with a jam from Victoria plums.
As you can see, the recipe requires 8 egg yolks, which always got me wondering what the hell to do with them egg whites... One option is to make something else that requires only egg whites, like cake biscuit, or macaroons, or meringue, etc. Alternatively you can use 4 whole eggs instead, but the taste of the crumble will be slightly different then (still tasty though). If you use 4 whole large eggs, it is better to use 600g of flour.

Need:
500g of flour
250 g of butter
8 egg yolks
1 tea spoon of baking powder
200 g of sugar
300 ml of plum jam
a handful of almond flakes

Beat egg yolks with sugar. Mix baking powder with flour, add room temperature butter, add egg yolks, knead it well. Let it cool of in a fridge for 30 min. Put baking paper into your oven dish and crumble the pastry (or rasp it on a vegetable rasp). Bake it on 180C for 20 minutes, take it out, smear the jam on top, add almonds on top of the jam and bake for another 20 minutes. Cool it off, cut into a cookie sized squares and enjoy.

Christmas Eve Apple Pie, aka Fake Fish

From where I come from, Christmas Eve dinner is the most important feast in the whole winter festivities cycle. It is a somber family dinner on a Christmas Eve, while still upholding fasting tradition. Traditionally there have to be 12 dishes served (for 12 Apostles, 12 months of the year, you can take your pick) and at times it can be a rather challenging meal to put together, considering individual preferences of the family members. Last year we found this recipe in some article about Dutch Christmas food in the middle ages, and made it with some modifications. Even though it uses no dairy or animal based products, it turned out to be a really nice apple pie, definitely a keeper.

Need
... for pastry:
500 g flour
120 g sunflower oil (at least I used it, other oils probably will do fine too)
40 g grinded almonds
250 ml of water

... for filling:
3 large apples
90g sugar
1 table spoon ginger
1 table spoon cinnamon
60-80 g grinded almonds (depends on how much there was in a package)

... for decorating
a handful of nice whole almonds
1 raisin or prune

Rasp apples on a vegetable rasp (the rough part). Don't have to peel them, but if the skin looks crap, which often is the case with own apples at this point of the year, you can peel them. Obviously, seed pods go out, we do not want them in a pie. Mix apples with other filling ingredients.
Knead the pastry from pastry ingredients, divide it into 3 balls, 2 big ones (one slightly smaller than the other) and 1 tiny one, that one will be for decoration elements. Roll an oval shape from the bigger ball first, that will be a bottom of your pie. Put a baking paper in your oven plate and place the rolled out pastry sheet on it. Put a filling on it, so that it is about a good 2 cm from the edges. Note: It is important to first put a bottom pastry sheet on an oven plate and only then add the filling, because otherwise it can be rather annoying to lift the whole thing and transport it to the oven plate.
Roll the smaller big ball of the pastry, put it on top and fold the edges. Make a fish tail and fin from the tiny ball, also a rope thingie to separate the "head". Decorate it with whole almonds to make scales and use a prune/raisin to make an eye.
Prick the pie with a fork next to the "head" rope, and around the edges so the steam can get out when baking, otherwise the top layer can burst open in the places where you do not want it to do that; while it does nothing for taste, it can ruin a presentation. Bake in an oven on 200C for about 40 min.

Flat Apple Pie

Ever since our apple trees started yielding more than one apple a year, it became a rather common subject for contemplations about what else we could possibly make from them. Last weekend I remembered that when I was growing up we hardly ever had a traditional apple pie, with crumbly pastry and apples on top. Instead, in all shops you could buy this flat apple pie, which generally gave an impression that something was pressing on it while it was baking, so it never had a chance to rise. I did not particularly like that one when I was a kid, because it often was too sour and too moist, but now, when I did not have it for a decade, I got an urge to try and make it at home.
Finding a recipe, however, proved not so easy. Eventually I found a few that looked plausible, compared them and put together something in between. The result was not exactly what I was looking for, because a texture of the pastry was different from the pie I remember, but non the less it is a really good apple pie.

Need:
250 g of butter
200 g of sour cream
400 g flour
1 satchel of vanilla sugar
2 eggs
1 kg of apples (more or less, sour kind)
1 table spoon of brown sugar (not flattened heap, a big one)
1 tea spoon of ginger powder
1 tea spoon of cinnamon powder

Soften the butter and knead it well with the sour cream, flour and vanilla sugar. Note, essentially this apple pie is not very sweet, so if you want something a bit more sweet-toothish, you can add a good spoon or two of a regular sugar into the pastry mix. Divide pastry into 2 balls and put it into a fridge.
While the pastry is cooling, prepare the apple filling. Peel the apples, take the seed pods and cut them in small pieces or grind them on a vegetable rasp. I prefer cutting, because then there is less juice coming out, but you get the point, small pieces.
Beat both eggs, then separate 1/3 of the mix to a separate bowl - that one would be for the top of the pie.
The remaining 2/3 of egg mass mix with brown sugar, ginger and cinnamon and then with apples.
Take out the pastry and roll it into two sheets, roughly a size of your pie form. The sheets have to be about 0,5-1 cm thick, not more, so a form has to be not a very tiny one. Put one sheet on the bottom, put the apples in, put the other one on top, and brush the remaining egg on top.
Bake at 200C about 30-40 min (until the top is nice and brown).

Karpatka pie

Right, I should probably have called this pie Paris- Carpathian Lass, or Karpatka-Brest. The story goes like this: I quickly saved a few recipes for Karpatka (Polish pie) and Paris Brest (French pie) to the same text file, with a though, that I will sort it out later. Later of course came about 2 years too late, when I could neither remember, nor trace back where and what came from; nor to which recipe the random parts of the text belonged. I still wanted to try it though, so I mixed what seemed to be a logical part of each recipe. In the end, after trial and error, there was one version of pastry and 2 versions of cream that were nice. I make the first version of cream most of the time, but some people who tasted it, preferred the second one.

Need:
Pastry:
250 ml of water (can be half water, half milk)
50 g butter
50g sugar
200 g flour
1 tea spoon baking powder
5 large eggs

Cream I:
1 l of milk
3 egg yolks
150 g sugar
1 cup of starch
1 satchel of vanilla sugar
150g butter
400 ml whipped cream

Cream II:
300 g curd cream, without any flavors
100 ml of condensed milk
100 g of butter
1 satchel of vanilla sugar

Pie part:
Boil 250 ml of water, melt butter and sugar in it. Fetch a whisk. Quickly pour all flour into boiling water and whisk like hell! The pastry thing in the pan should turn into one consistency without lumps. Boil it for about 2-3 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon, then take of the fire and cool off till it is hand warm. It is important to cool it off properly, because if you are not patient enough and start adding eggs too soon, they will basically cook in the pastry and the pie won't fluff out in the oven. So.... WAIT!

Turn oven on for 220C. Start adding eggs to the pastry, one by one (so the pastry can absorb them) and mix well. Now you can either split pastry into two separate sheets, or bake it at once, but then the layer on the oven plate should be a bit thicker. Put it in the preheated oven when it reaches max heat, bake for about 30-40 min. Can turn heat a bit down in the last 10 min.

Take it out, cool off. If it was one sheet approach, cut it in half (aka layers). Add cream in between, sprinkle with the sugar powder on top, or glaze with chocolate/white icing.

Cream I:

Beat egg yolks with sugar.
Slowly bring 800 ml of milk to boil, stirring occasionally as it is inclined to burn at the bottom. Add butter, melt it, add vanilla sugar. Whisk remaining 200 ml of cold milk with starch, add it to the boiling milk, mix it well until it boils again. Add eggs, mix well, boil it for another 2-3 min on slow fire.

Beat cold whipped cream. When the boiled cream cools off a bit, mix it with the cream, gradually.

From this amount there is a lot of cream, proportions can be a bit adjusted according to the own preferences. It is also very good cream for other sorts of pies.

Cream II:
Beat the room temperature butter, until white and fluffy with the mixer (about 10 min). Add condensed milk, beat some more. Add curd, mix it well in (if curd is very wet, get a tea towel and let the water dribble out a bit).
After combined with the pie part, this version has to stay in a fridge to stiffen a bit.