maiji: My first apple pie!!

[Images: Four photos of a homemade apple pie. 1) Before baking. The design on top is a haphazard overlapping swirl of rough leaf shapes with many gaps to see the pie filling 2) After baking. The leaf-shapes have turned a richly-textured golden brown. 3) Closeup of edge of pie. 4) Closeup of fork digging into a slice of pie that has fallen apart into crumble and juicy-looking apple chunks.]I love chunky fruit pies! I'm a complete sucker for classics like apple and strawberry rhubarb. One of my goals was to make a pie from scratch, and today was the day I attempted it. I'm really happy with how it turned out! It's far from perfect (and the crust in particular was super last-minute freestyling with leftover dough haha) but it smells and tastes exactly like my nostalgic dream of a really good homemade apple pie. It's got that wonderful mix of flaky-buttery-falling-apart-with-here-and-there-bits of crunchy-cookie-like crust and bursting-juicy-soft-but-still-chunky-mouthfuls-of-spiced-apples... so I consider it a success!I read and picked up some tips from a bunch of places, but the two main recipes I followed were: Spend with Pennies - Stovetop Apple Pie Filling Bigger Bolder Baking - No Roll Pie Crust Details of my pie/adjustments I made to the recipes (sometimes by accident) below the cut.The filling [READ-MORE] I used Red Prince apples because they were local and on sale. From my stand-in-the-grocery-store-look-things-up-on-my-phone research, they're supposed to be a cross between Red Jonathan and Golden Delicious (the latter of which were recommended by a number of sites as one of the top two best apples to make a pie from, the other being Northern Spy. Apparently the quality of modern-day Granny Smiths has gone down and they are no longer the champs of pie that they once were. Or so I learned from the apple pie fandom...) They were really big so I used three large ones. I did not peel them, and I chopped them more like rough .5" or longer rectangularish "cubes". At first I was worried it was way too much apple... but it ended up fine for a 9" pie. I used honey instead of sugar. I used 1 teaspoon cinnamon and maybe half a teaspoon of nutmeg...ish, because I spilled more nutmeg than I intended. Smelled amazing though! I followed the instructions of 4 teaspoons cornstarch+2 tablespoons water, but because it seemed like I had so many apples I got worried that it was too thin and later added ~1 tablespoon water and more than a teaspoon of cornstarch because, again, I spilled more by accident. The filling recipe says it's ten minutes but I'm slow so I took way longer than that. Maybe half an hour? I have no idea. I alternated between medium to low heat depending on if it was bubbling, and stirring intermittently. I also used the spoon to stab-cut some apple pieces in half every so often to see how they felt texture wise.[/READ-MORE] The pie crust [READ-MORE] I started this assembling ingredients and melting butter for this while the filling was sitting on the stove with heat turned off. I didn't add salt (because I used salted butter), and I also swapped the sugar for 1 teaspoon of honey... and forgot to add it till I had already started pressing the dough, so it might not have been distributed very well.  I don't think I got the thickness very consistent, and it was definitely more than 1/8" in most places, but I think that actually worked okay for me because then I got some of the fun crunchy cookie texture in places. I started doing it in a 10" pan, but the dough actually didn't seem enough, so I switched over to a 9" pan. I separated out maybe 1/3 of the dough? and added a bit back while working. I also added more water while pressing it. I couldn't for the life of me get the dough to hold/stick high enough to crimp the edges.  Did an egg wash (1 egg with a dollop of water) on the base. With the leftover dough I added water via wet hands and a lot of the egg wash, and maybe another teaspoon or something of the honey, then flattened it out to make random leaf shapes to cover the top. I started slicing leaves out with a paring knife but the dough wasn't holding the shape very well, so sometimes I'd just rip off parts and roughly shape a leaf and stick it on. Then brushed with the remaining egg wash.[/READ-MORE] The baking [READ-MORE] I read somewhere (I forget where...) to bake first at 475F for 20 minutes, and then reduce it to 350F for 60 minutes, and let it bubble for another 5 min before removing. I decided to do it as 475F for 15 min, then take a look, and then reduced it to 350F for 45min. I took it out to squeal over it and take some photos and then put it back in for another 5min. [/READ-MORE]It took me about 2 hours to get through both recipes, not including the baking time. I'm now in happy homemade pie heaven! No more buying grocery store pies!!