For my first recipe to try, the namesake of this project was the obvious choice! Plus, looking at the ingredients, I had a feeling this one would turn out absolutely delicious. I cannot say the same for others.

If you’re familiar with pie, you’ll notice something kind of fabulous: this is pretty much exactly what you use to make a bangin apple pie. Like I said, this really cannot be said for most of Guild Wars 2’s recipe, which sort of teeter on the edge of functional. So let’s gather up our ingredients and get to work!

not pictured: my guy laughing at me for arranging my ingredients for a cute photo like I’m a professional food blogger

The first step is making the dough for your pie crust. You can totally just buy one if you’re feeling lazy or not confident in your crust making skills, but this is really half of what makes a pie delicious. So maybe get over your pie insecurities and just make the god damn crust. In my case, I actually used my grandmother’s old recipe! I started by letting two sticks of butter soften to room temperature (you can put them into the microwave for instant gratification, but don’t let them turn to liquid). They went into a mixing bowl with flour and a little water, plus a bit of salt. Salt isn’t in the GW2 recipe but it should be and quite frankly I’m offended by the lack of salt in these recipes in general so the salt is just happening right now, okay??

I guess if you want to be a weird purist about it you can use salted butter instead of actual salt.

Anyway, once everything is in the bowl, I got in there with my hands and mixed it all together. You can give it a go with a spoon if you don’t want to touch it, but your hands are probably the best and fastest tool here. Just mush everything around until it’s thoroughly combined. Once it was lookin good, I sprinkled my work surface with a generous amount of flour and plopped the dough into the middle.

Your dough should look like this! If it’s crumbling apart and not holding together, add more water. If it’s too goopy, add flour.

Then I flattened it out with a rolling pin. Even my supposedly nonstick pin (it’s bs, everything sticks to it) will cling to the dough, so make sure you put flour on the rolling pin too. If the dough starts sticking to either your work surface or your rolling pin, just get some more flour up in there. Try to flatten it out with as few passes of the rolling pin as possible, since the more you do it the tougher the crust will become. Once it’s large enough to fit in your pie pan with a few inches hanging over each side, you’re good to go.

I found that getting the crust into the pie pan without breaking it was a two person job, but I’m a clumsy moron so you might be okay. Even if it breaks, you can easily mush the dough back together where it fell apart and it’s all good. Once it’s in the pan, gently push down on the bottom and along the corners to contour the crust to the pie pan’s shape. Then, trim the edges so that you only have about 2-3 inches of crust hanging off (I say trim but I just pulled bits off like a savage so don’t feel the need to get fancy here).

To make the edge of the crust, take the extra hanging off and fold it in, then under so that you have a thick band around the top of the pie. After folding a piece under, flatten it gently with your fingertips so it stays, then continue going around the pie until you’ve done the whole thing. See the highly scientific diagram above for a visual aid.

At that point you can leave the crust as is, or get fancy and give it a wiggly edge. Wiggly edge is the technical term for this used by real bakers literally everywhere. Just press the crust toward you with your index finger while pushing in the opposite direction with your thumb and the top of your middle finger. I kind of fucked it up so it doesn’t look that great, but at this point I was committed and did the whole thing.

Next up was the filling. The type of apples you use is totally up to you, depending on what you like. I used a mix of Gala and Honey Crisp because they are naturally very sweet (so I can use less sugar in the filling) and also hold their shape pretty well even after being baked. I needed about 8 or 9 apples to fill the whole pie, cored, peeled, and sliced. This can take a while, unless you are me and own this magical contraption, which peels, cores, and slices the apple for you in one go. You can buy one of these for less than $20, which I recommend if you plan on doing, I don’t know, a lot of apple stuff? Either way it’s a huge time saver.

Once my apples were ready, I put a layer of them down, then sprinkled them with a generous amount of cinnamon and sugar. I repeated this until the pie pan was full a little past the top, and added a tiny bit of nutmeg on the final layer. At this point the edges of my crust were also coated in a healthy cinnamon/sugar layer, which I have decided to see as a good thing.

I decided to make this a crumb-top pie, since otherwise there’s almost nothing to differentiate it from the regular apple pie recipe and that’s kind of dumb. To do the crumbs I combined brown sugar, white sugar, flour, butter, in cinnamon and, once again, got up in there with my hands and mushed it all together. It took a while, but eventually my mixture gained a really nice looking crumb texture.

Then, I sprinkled the crumbs evenly over the top of the pie. You will probably feel like you have a lot of crumbs, and that maybe you are putting too many on your beloved pie. But listen well, grasshoppers: you can never have too many crumbs. If it feels like too much, it is the perfect amount.

At this point, the pie is assembled and ready to go! I baked it at 350° for 60 minutes, until both the crumbs and the crust were nice and golden.

Well hello there, gorgeous. This pie tasted just as good as it looked. The crumbs had a nice, soft crunch and the middle was gooey and with just the right amount of sugar. Overall, not trying to brag here, but it was basically perfect. This is one boss pie, my friends.

But… wait a minute. I pledged to do my best to emulate the in-game picture for each recipe, and there’s something missing here. Something I can’t quite explain…

For real though, wtf is that on top of the pie? It kind of looks like ice cream with caramel drizzled over it and then a cherry stuck in there. But it ALSO resembles an apple that is like melting on the bottom or something. I’m sort of at a loss here. Even if it is caramel drizzled ice-cream with a cherry, the ingredients to produce that are not in this recipe at all. I have no fucking idea what is happening in this little 64×64 image but I did my best to interpret it.

Eventually I settled on it being a weird melty apple, mostly because I don’t have an ice cream machine and making caramel without milk or cream is like impossible and I just wasn’t up for that adventure today. However, I had no idea how to make an apple look like that because apples don’t melt like butter when baked, at least not at temperatures my oven is capable of achieving. So I figured I’d just wing it and see how it goes. I busted out my fancy apple peeler/corer machine and did 3 apples, but didn’t pull them apart like I did to make the filling. Instead, I coated them in cinnamon/sugar and put a few bits of butter in between some of the slices. I threw them in the oven at 350° for 40 minutes and waited to see what would happen. They definitely didn’t melt, if anything they lost moisture from baking, but they still looked plenty yum. This is probably the most ridiculous topping for apple pie ever created but at this point I am in too deep. I cut out a slice of my boss pie and topped it with this weird baked apple thing.

And there she is, apple and all! This still doesn’t really look like the picture but I did my best. The pie itself was out of this world delicious and the apple on top was a silly, but tasty treat. Sane individuals should really just stop before bothering with this weird apple topping but I’m still glad I gave it a go. Anyone who claims I didn’t go all in on this stupid recipe can get fucked.

The final verdict: this recipe is perfect without any adjustments at all. But unless you’re feeling adventurous, you can probably pass on the apple topping.