To me, nothing screams spring more than strawberries. Their beautiful vibrant color lends itself perfectly to this flowering season. This is why whenever Easter rolls around, or if I am throwing a garden party, or dinner party during Spring, my dessert of choice is always strawberry pie.

This is a great recipe to put together when you don’t have a lot of prep-time or when you just want to display some beautiful homegrown strawberries, since you will not be cooking the fruit.

For this recipe I used some of my Strawberry-Rosé low sugar preserves. If you make some, I highly recommend you use it for this pie, if not you can either skip this step or use any low-sugar strawberry jam or preserves. I find that it adds an extra punch of strawberry flavor and counteracts a bit of that “fake” strawberry flavoring that the gelatin has.

Strawberry Pie

Ingredients:

• 1 sheet of store-bought pie crust
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 2 lbs of strawberries (or two 16 oz. containers)
• 1 3 oz strawberry jello package
• 3/4 of a cup of sugar
• 2 Tbsps cornstarch
• 1 cup of water
• 1/4 cup Strawberry-Rosé Low Sugar Preserves (optional)
• whipped cream for serving

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400°. Spread butter on a 9 in. pie baking pan, making sure to cover all surface. Unroll sheet of pie crust into pan. Line crust with foil or wax paper and place another pie pan on top (to prevent the crust from rising) or with raw beans. Bake for 10 minutes, then remove other pan and foil and bake until it is fully golden brown, about another 5 minutes. Set aside until it cools.

While the pie cools, add the sugar, cornstarch, and water to a small saucepan (in that order is easier to combine) mix well and bring to a boil. Cook while stirring constantly until the mixture has thickened and turned clear. Remove from the heat, add the jello package and mix thoroughly. Then incorporate the Strawberry-Rosé preserves. Refrigerate until it slightly cools (about 10 minutes).

Meanwhile, slice all strawberries and arrange in the cooled pie crust. Pour the jello mixture over your berries, making sure you are evenly drizzling it so as to cover all the fruit and fill as many holes as possible.

Refrigerate pie until it sets. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream.

Note: You can garnish with a sprig of mint and some additional strawberries. I would recommend you garnish per slice, but if you know you are going to finish the whole pie, then you can just garnish it instead (less work).

Funny story about my pie crust. If you look at the picture you can see that it is uneven and doesn’t look like a store-bough sheet. Well… my store-bought pie crust decided to be uncooperative -_- and not fulfill it’s function of making my life easier >_<.

When I unrolled the first sheet it had mold (there seemed to be a hole in the bag that allowed some air in, which allowed for mold to grow, ewwwww). So needless to say that one went straight into the trash.

When I opened the second sheet, I was happy to find that it was in good condition (no, they were not expired, just the first sheet seemed to have a bag defect), however when I unrolled it, it just fell apart. So I ended up having to reroll the crust with some additional butter and flour. In the end it tasted great, but it resulted in an uneven crust since I did not have enough to cover the pan or make a pretty trim (which was the original purpose for the second pie sheet).

Life lesson learned; sometimes is just better to make things from scratch.