Paris in July: Baking a Blueberry Pie with Pâte Brisée

It started with this picture:

It's a blueberry pie.

Look at that beautiful crust.

I got this cookbook at the school bookfair this spring:

That blueberry pie is in this book.

I've been reading The Sweet Life in Paris: 

Delicious Adventures in the World's Most 

Glorious---and Most Perplexing---City. 

It is written by pastry chef David Lebovitz and

 it's full of little stories and recipes 

about all the glorious pastries and desserts and foods in Paris. 

One of the recipes is for Gateau Therese Chocolate Cake.

Here's a picture of the cake from David's website:

The recipe is in the book. 

Butter. Sugar. Eggs. Flour. Salt. Bittersweet chocolate.

Yum.

And I'm reading Paris My Sweet:

A Year in the City of Light (and Dark Chocolate).

It's written by food writer Amy Thomas

and it is also full of little stories (though no recipes, sadly) 

about all the glorious pastries and desserts and foods in Paris. 

Amy has lots of great photos of pastries from Paris bakeries

posted on her blog, God, I Love Paris. 

Here's one:

There are a lot more. You should take a look at all these beautiful pastries.

Reading about cakes and madeleines and muffins 

and pain perdu and bonbons and viennoiseries and 

macarons and chocolates and truffles and baguettes and eclairs....

Well, I had to cook something.

I love to bake. I started looking carefully at that recipe for Lattice-Top Blueberry Pie. 

The recipe said to start with Pâte Brisée,

to make that wonderful pie crust.

Pâte Brisée.

That sent me off to this book:

It's yet another book I'm reading this month.

All about baking.

James Peterson taught me about Pâte Brisée (basic pie dough)

 as well as Pâte Sablée (very buttery sweet pie dough) and 

Pâte Sucrée (sweet and crisp pie dough).

Which is a long, long way of saying 

that I ended up making this beautiful blueberry pie today:

The dough looked exactly like

the dough on the cover of Baking.

Here it is,

right out of the oven!

Am I too old to go to Paris and

study baking at Ecole Lenôtre?

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads and is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend.You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. For more information, see the welcome post.