this time last week, the cold, harsh light of day saw me finishing up the last, leftover slice of a sour cherry pie with a pistachio crumble topping. i was sad to see it go. it had been long, long overdue, and the previous friday afternoon i had arrived for a weekend at my aunt’s house with two containers of dry ingredients measured and mixed and ready to go. one was to become the crust, and the other, the crumble.

more weeks ago than i’m prepared to specify, the good people at penguin mailed me a crisp, new copy of “the sweet melissa baking book“. i must admit i was not immediately enamoured of this book. aside from feeling generally ambivalent about cake (!) after the nonstop cakefest that was xmas, new year, chinese new year, sister-in-town… there was the somewhat lacklustre publication design to get past.

it’s 2008 after all. who puts out a cookbook — a cakebook, no less — with no pictures but for an 8-page colour section two-thirds of the way through? the rest of it — 240 pages in total — is cheap black helvetica on cheap white paper, with copperplate headings and mustard yellow embellishments. there are bees on every second page — the logo of the eponymous brooklyn-based bakery. it really looks like an early-90s effort, and even coming from me, with all the golden memories of the early 90s, this is no compliment, humpf.

but. see. the more i flipped through the book, never really wincing less at the just too large italicised helvetica introductions to each recipe, the more i came to realise that you really shouldn’t judge a book by its interior design (the cover is… fine. not “ooh baby, you so fine”, but just, “oh, alright. fine.”: there is an honest photograph of a chocolate cake, crowned in nubile and glistening berries; but there is also a subhead in 12pt helvetica bold.). in fact, the book is so packed full of delicious-sounding things, that i could not decide what to tackle first.

there is a good selection of trusty basics: orange-scented scones, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate walnut brownies. there is a chapter of some quite over-the-top layer cakes: sweet almond cake with lemon curd and lemon mascarpone frosting, roasted pecan cake with caramel orange marmalade and burn orange buttercream, (there is a classic red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.) there is a bit up the back full of truffles and caramels. and in between, there are buns, pies, cookies, cakes, and cookie cakes.

eventually, i picked the sour cherry pie with pistachio crumble, because i love every single word in the name (yes, even “with”.). also, in her introduction, sweet melissa claims it is her favourite pie, and a best-seller at her bakery. there was even a glossy colour photograph of it. i set to work.

the section on pies begins with a lesson on pie dough. it is a comprehensive breakdown on all the elements that go into the crust, and what to do with them. there is a page on pie dough technique, followed by three recipes for different sorts. all up, it’s 11 pages of thorough instructions, about an hour and a half of combined chilling time alone, and me, a pastry novice, making a rather wonderful crust that baked up golden brown, light, crisp and flaky.

yay.

the crumble topping, with its whole oats ground to a flour and its pistachios hand-choppped, was even more wonderful — sweet and crunchy with a rich, buttery, pistachioey flavour. the cherry filling — now that’s where i came unstuck. i’m blaming the kilo of frozen cherries; i’m going to argue that they released a lot of moisture as they thawed in the oven. at the end, they were so plump and juicy that the base of the pie crust disintegrated into soddenness. delicious sod, mind, which more or less rendered this pie into a crumble with a pastry crown. and we all fell upon it like bears.

one of my favourite memories of new york is of sitting in the upstairs cafeteria at bloomingdales, eating a wedge of blueberry pie to recover from the ordeal that is accompanying my mother shoe-shopping. the crust on top was light, crisp and flaky, and sprinkled in sugar. once i figure out how to overcome the soggy fruit, i think this book will take me right back.