My First Blueberry Pie

The top crust broke and the blueberries seeped, but it tasted damn good for a first try. This was the first fruit pie I've ever made. It was surprisingly easy to make homemade crust. I found an all-butter recipe in the book How To Cook Everything: The Basics by Mark Bittman. It's verrrry easy with a food processor.

I've made pat-in-the-pan crust before (for pumpkin pie), but this rolled type is so much better. It came out nice and flaky. It was actually easier than pat-in-the-pan anyway...so it's rolled crusts from now on for me!

The blueberry filling recipe was from The Joy of Cooking. I used frozen storebought blueberries, which aren't as good as fresh, I'm afraid. The pie definitely wasn't as good as Brenda's pies -- she uses homegrown blueberries! Maybe if I can get my hands on some good fresh blueberries and practice more often, my pies will taste better. (And maybe LOOK better, haha.) I'm definitely psyched to make more of these.

More Origami Flowers

More experiments with using different paper for origami flowers. The red paper is a nice textured scrapbook paper that I bought at Michael's. The edges showed some wear after folding, but overall it keeps its shape well.

The ivory flowers are made from a wedding patterned gift wrap paper that I bought at The Container Store. I like how gift wrapping paper holds up to folding, and it's cheaper than fancy scrapbooking paper or origami paper. But the glossiness of the gift wrap paper makes it a little difficult to photograph. I wonder if a big bouquet of glossy ivory and white flowers will get washed out in photos?