apple and marmalade freeform pie

My sister went into hospital last night to start having a baby (baby is a bit reluctant to leave the womb-y goodness, so they're giving her a friendly shove). Naturally my first thought was, 'I'd better make her a pie.'

My Australian Women's Weekly Bake book advised me that from all the stuff I had in my kitchen at the time, I could make an apple and marmalade freeform pie, which seemed apt as I could use the delicious grapefruit-lemon-orange-marmalade that my sister made me for Christmas.

Creepy thing about this recipe: The pastry calls for cheese. AWW advises me that apple pie made with a cheese pastry is much loved in the USA. Adding cheese makes the pastry more "short." That's all well and good, but I'm making this pie for a pregnant lady and I don't think now is the time for crazy pastry games.

Omitting the cheese, I followed the recipe carefully:

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups (375g) plain flour
185g butter, chopped coarsely
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup (60g) finely grated cheddar cheese
1/4 cup (60ml) iced water, approximately
2 tbsp marmalade (any flavour)
1 egg white

Filling:
6 medium apples (900g), peeled and cored
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp brown sugar

You'll Love Coles apples...mmm, delicious.

Method:
1. Halve apples; cut each half into 6 wedges. Cook apple and water and sugar in medium saucepan, covered, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes or until apple softens. Cool.

I always find the cooking time for apples in these recipes a little short--I must like my apple more smooshy. I went for about 10 minutes.

2. Process flour and butter until crumbly. Add egg yolks, cheese and enough of the water to process until ingredients comes together. Knead on floured surface until smooth. Enclose in plastic wrap; refrigerate 30 minutes.

At this point, the instructions to 'knead until smooth' confused me. It's shortcrust pastry, right? I can't knead it until smooth. And if I did, it wouldn't be short! Anyways, I kneaded it for a while, assuming it had to be a little more elastic than usual in order to fold it over itself later. As you can see, it remained short.

3. Preheat oven to 200C/180C fan-forced.
4. Roll pastry between sheets of baking paper to 40cm round. Remove top sheet of paper, turn pastry onto oven tray, remove remaining paper.

I found I didn't need the top layer of baking paper here, the pastry wasn't sticky or hard to handle.

5. Spread filling over pastry, leaving a 5cm border. Dollop teaspoons of marmalade about 2cm apart over filling .

Went a little overboard on the marmalade.

Fold and pleat pastry up and over to partly enclose fruit; brush pastry with egg white. Bake about 30 minutes.

Verdict: Nice, but inoffensive. The flavours are mild on account of there being no spices and hardly any sugar, as well as the pastry not being sweetened. Adding cheese to the pastry definitely would have given it more punch, but I'm still not convinced it's a sane thing to do. The pastry was lovely--nice and short but not too dense. I ate a slice with yoghurt and I think it would really need something along these lines (ice cream, cream) to accompany it, because being an open pie, it's not super-moist.

Most importantly, the morning after dropping a few slices off to my sister, her waters broke. Just saying.