Joanna Gaines’ Apple Pie

After literally a year of thinking about it, writing about it, telling my fiancé about it, and avoiding it, I’ve finally started my very own food blog. I’ve loved baking, cooking, and entertaining ever since I ditched the dorms in college for an apartment with a real kitchen, and since then I’ve thought about how cool it would be to write some of my favorite recipes down to share with others. Now that I’m a senior in school with literally no responsibilities beyond work and finding a big boy job (seriously, I’m taking yoga and Zumba for credit this semester; I’ve got nothing but free time), I figured it would be a great time to make my dream come true of starting a blog that will help me pay for brand-name ingredients and maybe my shopping and Indian food habits. For now, probably two people will read this post, and they may or may not be my mom and fiancé.

Baby steps.

With this blog, I hope to provide easy recipes that are sometimes healthy (but oftentimes not) that anyone can make. So few people cook because they think it’s hard or expensive, but it’s really not that scary! So in the spirit of making things easy, I tried to emulate the legendary Joanna Gaines by making her apple pie as my very first blog recipe.

Easy, right?

I’ve been a fan of Chip and Joanna Gaines for a long time, and I was so excited to learn that they were coming out with a magazine! I picked up my copy of Magnolia Journal at my local Lucky’s Market and read the whole thing on the car ride to Nashville to see Adele (10/10 would recommend by the way).

As soon as I saw her recipe for apple pie, I knew it would be the perfect thing to start my journey to actually becoming Joanna. If I could nail this pie, I could move on to bigger and better things in her recipe repertoire. And let me tell y’all…

I messed up.

Well, not really. As a poor college kid that has a Netflix account with several hours of unwatched Hawai’i Five-0 episodes on it, I decided that I had not the time nor money to make my own crust from scratch.

You see this pale, sad excuse of a store-bought crust I used instead? I’d like to think that Queen Gaines would understand that I’m not at “homemade pie crust” level yet. Regardless of how time-consuming or scary it sounds, I encourage you to try making your own crust. With a store-bought version, the crust is just an unnecessary addition to the delicious filling, much like lettuce and salad dressing.

And y’all, what a filling it is. The addition of maple syrup is what takes this to the next level and lets you get away with using a little less sugar to make sure the filling is nice and smooth without being grainy. Normally when I bake, I eat the results for about a day and get tired of it, but I ate this pie for days. Even people that aren’t a fan of sweet things said that this was a pretty good pie. I hope you get a chance to try it out!

Joanna Gaines' Apple Pie

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Prep Time 30 mins

Cook Time 1 hr 20 mins

Total Time 2 hrs 50 mins

Servings 8 servings

Ingredients

  

• 2 9-inch pie crusts (store-bought or from your favorite recipe)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 6 cups thinly sliced and peeled apples (I used 5 medium-small red apples, including Gala and Rome varieties)
• 1/4 cup pure maple syrup (not pancake syrup)
• 1 Tbsp heavy cream
• 2 Tbsp pure maple syrup (for topping)

Instructions

 

• Preheat oven to 375°F. Roll out your bottom pie crust into a 9-inch pie plate.
• Stir together sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt. Add the apples, tossing them with your hands to ensure every apple is coated with the dry mixture. Add the 1/4 cup of maple syrup, tossing again to ensure even coating.
• Transfer the filling to the pie crust. Drizzle the heavy cream over the filling evenly.
• Place your second pie crust on top of the filling, folding the edges under the edges of the bottom one. Crimp as desired, and cut vent holes in the middle.
• To prevent a burnt edge, wrap the edges of the pie in aluminum foil. Bake in the preheated oven for 50 minutes. Remove the foil, and continue baking 30-40 minutes until the filling is bubbling and the pastry is golden brown.
• Immediately brush the pie with the remaining 2 Tbsp. of maple syrup, the let the pie sit and cool for another hour. Serve warm with ice cream (vanilla and cookie dough work best in my opinion).

Notes

This recipe is adapted from Joanna Gaines' from her magazine, Magnolia Journal.