Food Apps Review of the Week: Pie Apps

If I had my choice between a great slice of pie and a great piece of cake, I’m choosing pie. There’s just something about a delicious crust that houses the goodness of sweetened berries or silky pudding. Don’t get me started on the options for toppings. Here are four pie apps that aim to make the baking process easy and accessible.

Appetites’ Easy As Pie
Developer: Clear-Media
Cost: $2.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: http://easyaspieapp.com

This app is slick. It’s got a unique navigation system where you scroll up and down between video previews before you strike the recipe or pie lesson you want to view. Each step is its own short video—there are over 20 recipes for pie, topping and crust that total over 5 hours of video. Some of the introduction videos are preloaded in the app and the recipes themselves require you to download them, which takes about a minute.

Once the recipe is downloaded the recipe video plays very smoothly and the host, Evan Kleiman, walks you step-by-step through the baking process in a very understandable and entertaining manner. You can e-mail the ingredient list and tweet when you’re about to bake. I just wish I could scrub or pause the videos once they’ve started playing. They’re short enough that it’s not really an issue, but more of a convenience request. Not that the other pie apps I reviewed don’t offer anything, but this is the pie app you’ll want to take out of the case and bite into and then come back for seconds.

Toque Rating: 4.5/5

iBake Pies
Developer: GotFocus Solutions
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: www.gotfocussolutions.com

Not the sugary pies that you’d think of, iBake Pies offers just 20 recipes of the more savory sort, such as Irish Mutton and Terrace Crab. Each recipe includes a thumbnail and a larger photo, a prep time, cooking time, serving amount and difficulty level. Be aware the ingredient list uses the metric system. This app doesn’t offer much. There’s no navigation because this app can’t do anything other than display one of the 20 recipes. To be honest, this app looks like nothing more than a class project that got submitted to the app store. It’s best to save room (and your 99 cents) for another slice of pie.

Toque Rating: 1.5/5

iCooking Pies and Quiches
Developer: Apps of All Nations
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone, Android
Website: www.icookingapps.com

This app has put forth some effort to make more than just a list of recipes. It has organized the recipes into five categories from Sweet Pies to Savory Pies. Each recipe includes a nice color photo, an ingredient list and preparation guidelines. Each of these sections can be accessed by swiping left and right, a nice touch instead of trying to hit a tiny navigation button. Recipes in this app can also be e-mailed and saved to a favorites list. This app does have some original design to it, but I feel the recipe section is slightly disjointed from the navigation design. A little more polish and a few more features and this pie app could be sweet and savory.

Toque Rating: 3/5

Pie Recipes
Developer: Jan Nemecek
Cost: $1.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: www.coffeecupapp.com/support

This app is all about pie recipes. There are definitely no frills to it at all. In fact, there’s not much outside of pie recipes: no shopping list feature, no rating system, no sharing options, or any other features you’d expect to find in an app. You can, however, save your favorite recipes.

With that being said, there are a lot of pie recipes to this app and you can quickly scroll through them. The recipe pages are easy to read, but there’s nothing special about the recipe pages. Overall, it would be great if the developer had organized the pies into their own categories, such as berry, cream, etc. This app isn’t bad, but it’s got a bit of a dry crust.

Toque Rating: 2/5