If your oven runs hot, just check on it around 40 minutes. Place into the oven and cook for 50 minutes.

Pour the crumble mixture all over the top of the pie, and arrange accordingly if you are into that type of thing. I place mine on a baking sheet in case it cooks over.

You want that cold butter so that the dry mixture can hold onto that butter. Take the butter and cut that into the dry mix. To that crumble bowl add in all of the dry ingredients and whisk as well. Just make sure there are no clumps of dry ingredients hanging on the fruit. Now pour that over the fruit and give it a good stir and let it marinate in that mixture. Whisk it around to incorporate all of those dry ingredients. So the flour, cinnamon, salt, cornstarch, and nutmeg go in.

To the crumble bowl (we will use it for the crumble in a few minutes), mix the dry ingredients for the fruit bowl. To the fruit add the lemon juice and give that a good stir. The skins remain on, and just cut around the pit. Do you want massive chunks of plums, or random bite sized slices? You decide. You do what you feel, but think of those eating your pie. To the fruit bowl, add in the sliced plums. One for the fruit, and one for the crumble.

4 tbsp unsalted butter, very cold, sliced.

9 plums, sliced to your liking (~ 2lbs).

1 frozen pie crust (I used Trader Joe’s along with a pie pan).

I decided to use store bought pie crust from Trader Joe’s, which I highly recommend. I knew I would probably not win as I think it takes many pies to perfect (hopefully) a great crust. It uses only some basic pantry ingredients, and use your favorite frozen pie crust. That’s when I took some of my pie baking skills and put them to the test with this plum pie. I had some testing to be done, and the excitement built. If the plum tasting failed, I knew that I could at least create a pie and enter it into our annual pie contest which was only days away. I’m typically not an impulse shopper so I sat there and thought who would eat all of these plums if I were to purchase them? I immediately default to my daughter, but I knew that if biting into one of those plums and if it would not delight her, pretty instantly, that I would be sitting on 20 plums. While at Costco I tend to browse slightly longer than I normally would, and I am lucky I did as I came across a large container of plums. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind going and reloading fresh fruit (I’d rather be doing that than reloading chips), cleaning everything, and repeating. It seems as though every couple of days I am back at Costco buying large quantities of strawberries, blueberries, and Filipino mangoes. My wife and daughter have been plowing down fruit like it is going to be the end of the world. For whatever reason, I have been purchasing a lot of fruit from Costco.

Plum pie message