Recently we grabbed some store bought pie crusts because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to make pie dough for turkey pies. Silly me should have just made the pie dough because when I opened the store bought crusts they were in pieces. Literally pieces of the pie crust were no longer attached and were floating freely in the box.
So I ended up making dough for the turkey pies and was not impressed while doing it. Not wanting to waste these store bought crusts, I headed over to Pinterest to find a way to use these and I stumbled onto things called hand pies. Why have I not heard of these before!?! Completely intrigued I found a recipe to try from Cooking on the Front Burners.
Apple Hand Pies (original recipe)
2 pkgs. store bought pie crust (2 crusts in box)
2 1/4 cups apples, peeled and chopped very small
1 1/4 tbsp flour
1/4 cup white sugar
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 egg (for egg wash)
1. Set out dough to thaw to room temperature. This doesn't take too long, maybe 30 minutes (you can see some of the missing crust below and all of the cracks). At the same time preheat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Toss apples with flour in a medium bowl until coated. Stir in sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon. I used quite a bit of cinnamon because that's how we like our apple pie. Set the apple filling aside.
3. Take dough out of the pie shell and flatten on a floured surface, like your counter. Use a cookie cutter to cut circles in the pie dough, mine was a 2-inch circle and way too small. I switched to a 3-inch heart halfway through but it was still too small. Re-roll the scraps to use as much of the dough as you can, making sure that you have an even number.
4. Place dough on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Next is placing the apple filling onto the dough. I was able to get roughly 2 teaspoons on my dough circles, where the original recipe managed 2-3 tablespoons. I was able to get 2 1/2 teaspoons in my hearts. Place another dough circle over top and pinch edges together. You may have to remove some of the filling to get the dough to pinch together. Once together use a fork to flute the edges and poke the top with the fork.
5. Beat egg with 1 tablespoon of water to make an egg wash and brush the tops of the pies. If you want you can top with coarse sugar, which I did with my hearts and recommend. Bake for 10 - 11 minutes, adjusting for the size of your hand pies.
Once they have cooled, roughly an hour, you can enjoy. Now I have this labelled as a baking fail because we found these to be crust heavy. I know this is because of the size of hand pies that I made, but there was barely any filling. If you like your pies like that, you are crazy. For us, they just didn't hit the mark.
These hand pies definitely need to be made with a biscuit cutter, at least 4 inches like the original recipe to get the crust to filling ratio a little more even. But that being said, the process worked beautifully, the size of the dough was 100% the problem. I also want to note that I had a ridiculous amount of filling leftover. I followed the original recipe and used 4 cups of apples, which I think would still be too much because I used four crusts where they used two.
We ended up using some vanilla ice cream leftover from Braxton's birthday and these went from a 5 out of 10 to at least an 8. So yummy with ice cream, the extra crust didn't seem so overwhelming. I will definitely be trying the recipe again with a larger cookie cutter and will let you guys know if they come out any better. Maybe even with a different filling, I saw that some people use jam. I am even more intrigued.
Have you guys ever had or made hand pies? Or like me had never heard of them before? They really are a great way to use broken store bought pie crusts, or even extra dough from pies.
Kerby
Linking to:
eighteen25 - Show and Tell #15
Gingersnap Crafts - Wow Me Wednesday #287
Two Chicks and a Mom - Funtastic Friday 2/23/17
Naptime Creations - Create, Link, Inspire 2/27/17
My dad used to surprise us with those store bought, sugar laden, apple pies and we loooooved them! Now that I'm older, I look at sugar differently but, these remind me of those minus all the junk they put into them. Thank you for sharing these with us at Funtastic Friday and for sharing the things you'd do differently. Pinning :D
ReplyDelete