Petra Cox: I am Petra Cox with Moms Apple Pie Company in Occoquan, Virginia and today were showing you how to make a pumpkin pie from scratch and weve made a bottom crust for our pumpkin pie and weve made a pumpkin pie filling but there are different ways that you can sort of spice up your pumpkin pie and make it something a little different. I am going to show you some optional additions to your pumpkin pie. So, one of them would be grated orange zest, it adds sort of a brighter color just ever so slightly and it adds sort of nice zesty flavor to your pumpkin pie. So on your regular sort of box grater, you can just grate an orange and you dont get too deep in to the white part underneath this orange skin.

This is a flavor that goes really nice with the spices like cloves and nutmeg that you might not accept in a pumpkin pie. So, grating about half of that orange gives us about a teaspoon of zest, if you kind of squish it up. Another one would be ginger. Fresh ginger is really a nice addition. Dry ginger has a potent but mellow flavor. Its really concentrated in there but theres spiciness to a fresh ginger that you dont quite get out of the powdered ginger.

If you like you can also add chopped candy ginger. So, when you get a nice fat little knob of ginger, you can take off the skin with a knife and the skin is pretty thin on ginger but there often little kind of arms and knobs that you can cut off to get to a nice big chunk. And just grated orange on this but thats okay. Im going to add this both them to the pie.

And I am using the small side of the grater, so thats another, maybe tea spoon and a half of ginger and Ill add these both in to the pie. Filling here, so I just fill those in and mix them up and you can smell them, its really-really fragrant. Another thing you can add for a sort of richer flavor is molasses. Molasses is sort of a by-product of the sugar process and its really dark rich colored and its a part of what makes ginger bread a nice rich treat. So this one, you can add any where from a teaspoon to a tablespoon of a molasses, as it slightly liquefies the pumpkin pie little bit. But itll still set up just fine and also any other kind of extracts like vanilla or almond or hazelnut can add a sort of unusual twist. So, I am going to add a little bit of vanilla. Vanilla darkens the pumpkin pie filling ever so slightly too, and molasses gives it a nice rich color and flavor.

So I have added vanilla, ginger and orange in small amounts, just a half a teaspoon of vanilla and it makes a really wonderfully fragrant pumpkin pie. So, now that I have made our pumpkin pie filling and spiced it up with some additional ingredients, Im going to pour it in to the crust and get it in to the oven. We bake it at 325 degrees in our convection ovens but it can be any where from 350-400 degrees in your home oven probably some where right around 375 actually.

So I am going to pour this in to our pie crust alright. So now were going to put it in to the oven and bake it for 45 minutes to an hour, alright. So were going to bake our pie and the next step would to be put our decorative leaf on about midway through baking and aside from that we are done with our pumpkin pie.