Pie # 10 - Cause we are in October. Fall. Halloween. Heading into the Holiday Season. Can you believe it? Does it feel like October to you? Does it feel like I've featured 10 cakes, 9 pies, 9 breads and 9 cookies so far? And I'm now ready to show you Pie # 10? Really? It's hard for me to believe, and I'm the one who's baked the treats and taken pictures and written about them!
I hope you've enjoyed these posts. I was talking with folks at work yesterday about my blog plan for 2015, and they offered me some very good ideas, so I may keep talking about food next year...still all TBD...
But for this month, for our Pie # 10, for Halloween, it is all about bite-size pies, because Halloween is all about bite-sized treats!
These are little mini-apple turnovers, shaped in three different ways, and then little cinnamon bites I made as a last-minute decision, because I ran out of pie filling before running out of dough. I made these with apple filling, because we went apple picking last Sunday, so I had a few apples on hand.
But these can be made with any fruit pie filling (including canned) such as cherry or blueberry. They can also be made with puff pastry (frozen or homemade) but I chose to use this pastry dough made with simply cream cheese, butter, flour and salt. It is one of the easiest doughs to work with, almost fool proof and works very nicely for hand-held pastries such as these turnovers.
I used my food processor and simply put these 4 ingredients in the bowl.
8oz cream cheese, cut in 8 parts
2 sticks butter, cut in 4 parts each
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 t. salt
I mixed the flour and salt for about 5 seconds and then put the cream cheese and butter over the flour in a circle and then mixed until it started to hold together but did not form a ball. Like this. It should form a ball easily with your fingers, but if the food processor formed the ball, it would develop that much more gluten.
I formed it into a disk and wrapped it up and put in in the fridge overnight. Good night dough!
Then I made the apple pie filling.
2 apples, peeled and diced
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup apple cider
2 T. apple butter
1 T. flour
Dash of salt
1 t. cinnamon
1/8 t. ginger
1/8 t. allspice
Dash of nutmeg
2 Redhots
1 T. butter
Dash of vanilla
I put everything except for the butter and vanilla in a saucepan to cook.
Once it boiled, I let it cook for another couple of minutes before mixing in the butter and vanilla at the very end.
Then it was time to tell the pie filling good night!
When I was ready to bake, I began by splitting the dough into 4 pieces and started rolling.
For our first shape, I cut two circles of dough - well, really three once you count the small circle in the middle of the top piece of dough! - and put them together with about a teaspoon of filling in the middle and sealed with an egg wash and fork tines. Kinda cute!
But also kinda take a lot of time, so I switched to single circles of dough with 1 teaspoon of filling but folded in half like a taco.
I still sealed with egg wash and fork tines. I also poked a few holes in these with a wood skewer to let air escape.
So now my parchment-lined cookie sheet looked like this!
But I still had more dough and more filling and more space on my cookie sheet, so I had to keep on going!
This time I switched to making squares. I evened off the edges of the dough to give me straight lines.
Then since I was going for bite-sizes, I measured off 3" lines.
To make 3" squares.
Again with a rough teaspoon of filling, a little egg wash, a fold on the diagonal, some fork tines and a few holes poked in the top and we have our triangles!
But then I also had to think about G...and he was going to want more than a mere bite! So I made a few larger ones based on 4-1/2" squares.
But the same technique as the 3" ones, except for a few more holes poked in the top. However I must have taken this pic before I poked the holes, so please just imagine poked holes, ok?
I set the turnovers in the freezer for about 20 - 30 minutes before brushing with the egg wash (for more even browning) and sprinkling with some sparkling sugar. These are ready for the 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes!
And now I was out of apple pie filling but I still had dough left over. The dough scraps are also just about fool proof, no special handling needed. What to do, what to do?
This! One of my favorite things that mother would do with pie crust scraps. She would spread the dough with soft butter...
...and then yummy cinnamon sugar.
Now Mother would stop right there and bake it off, and it was yummy. (Almost better than the pie!) But I was going for bite-sized treats, so I rolled the dough up into a log and cut slices like cinnamon rolls. These turned out kinda cute, too!
Here is how these baked up...
...and here is how the turnovers baked up...the circle ones...
...and the folded over ones...
Yep, some of them oozed out. Criminal. I shouldn't have served these, I'm sure. But once I added a swirl of icing on the tops, no one even noticed!
I can't forget G's turnovers! They got a drizzle of icing, too!
As did the little cinnamon bites...simply little bites of cinnamony-sugary flaky crust heaven, I tell ya!
Put the all together, and we have our platter!
Now I was going to also make a little pumpkin bite made with a cookie crust base and some pumpkin mousse piped on top, but once I put them all together Thursday morning to taste, it just didn't work. I didn't like how the crust played with the mousse - the texture was all off and overpowered the smooth subtlety of the mousse - so I left those at home. But I had this pumpkin mousse made, so I had to do something with it! How about this?
A simple pumpkin roll filled with that pumpkin mousse - what one taster described as, "Oh, sweet mother of everything holy. That is 10 times better than any piece of pumpkin pie I've ever had."
Not a bad way to use up some pumpkin mousse on a Friday morning, huh? Not bite-size, but it is still another yummy Halloween treat!
As always, thanks for stopping by and patiently reading as I learn this blog thing. Hope you enjoy!
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