pie ... and cider

I'm going through a cider phase at the moment. I LOVE IT. And the other night when I decided to make a rhubarb pie, and discovered I was missing one ingredient - an orange - I decided to use cider instead!

Okay, so it's not the most thrilling recipe adaptation ever made. It's exciting for me, though, because I normally keep to the recipe as if I'm rewiring a circuit and one false move will zap me. This also happens to be the dessert that I always requested when I was a child, and which my mother always made for my birthday, etc. So it's pretty remarkable that I would allow anything to change about it.

So this is the recipe for my rhubarb and cider pie, which is MOSTLY someone else's recipe, from a long time ago, but partly mine!

I cheat and buy sweet shortcrust pastry, and use it to line the pie tin. Keep some aside for the lattice top.

For the filling you will need about 500g rhubarb stems (without the poisonous leaves) chopped up into small slices, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon jelly (jell-o?) crystals, 1/4 cup flour, 2 tablespoons melted butter, and enough cider to make the whole lot of this moist but not too runny.

Put all this into the lined pie tin.

To make a lattice top:
1 - roll the pastry out into a circle measuring the same as the top of the pie.
2 - cut it into 1cm strips.
3 - Drape half the strips across the pie in one direction.
4 - Fold every second one back.
5 - Lie a strip crosswise, near the centre, and then unfold the folded strips.
6 - Fold the previously unfolded strips back over the crosswise strip.
7 - Continue following this method, until you have used all the strips and formed a lattice design.
Press all of these against the edges.

Bake at 220*C / 430*F for 20 minutes until golden brown, then at 180*C / 350*C until the rhubarb is tender.

This is SERIOUSLY YUMMY. Be careful. It disappears fast.