Whoa. It’s been so long since my last post that I had to go back and remind myself about what my life was like the last time I wrote in this thing. After some careful, intense reading light, lazy skimming, I recalled that I was talking about how I hoped for a much calmer, quiet year. WELP, as my old friend Jesus Christ liked to say: LOL! Wait…
Anyway, yeah, I have been hiding out big time. It’s weird. I guess the older you get, the more your relationships to people, places, (animal, vegetable, mineral…) and just yourself change. Or maybe that’s just me and I shouldn’t be weirdly speaking in the second person? I don’t know. As much as I love this blog, and as much as I love all things social media– my boyfriend would tell you it’s an annoyingly unhealthy amount– it makes me sad that it’s all taken the place of hours-long phone conversations, face-to-face meetings and just social interaction in general. It’s easier to find out if someone has a cold through Twitter than it is to find out through a phone chat, because PHONE CHATS? ARE YOU MY MOTHER? And in this weird, counter-intuitive way, it’s all made me super anti-social. Like, I’d-rather-be-knitting-awesome-headbands-and-just-watching-the-paint-in-my-bathroom-dry-than-oversharing anti-social. By the way, I am SO going to Pinterest the ridiculously awesome paint job my boyfriend did in our bathroom. Sh*t. I’ll just never learn, will I?
I definitely didn’t explain that well. I think the short version is that I’m a very private person who cherishes my relationships with people and is scared to see those relationships disappear or change. I guess that’s the abridged version. You can skip all of the crap above this if you want. Or just skip straight to the mini pies below.
*RECORD SCRATCH*
Mini pies?! Dude… why didn’t I just LEAD with that, right? I know, unbelievable. Let’s just…get on with it then.
So, these are basically something I just came up with after I realized I had a lot of leftover dough from a failed coconut pie attempt. I plastic-wrapped the remaining dough up, froze it, and finally thawed it out when I was feeling just sad enough for a taste of pie but not sad enough to make regular-sized pie. Feel me?
Mini Pies (how many this makes depends on how much dough you have)
For the crust (note: this will make enough for a single-crust 9-inch pie. You can totally use this for a regular pie and then take the scraps and use the heck out of them for mini pies. Or just make a bunch of minis. Do you.)
1 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
1 stick of very cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
A bowl of ice water
Melted butter
Cinnamon sugar (1 teaspoon of cinnamon + 1/4 cup of sugar)
For the filling (note: you can kind of go crazy here as long as you’re not trying to make fruit pies, since those will cook differently)
Chocolate Chips
Peanut butter
Jelly
Shredded Coconut
…You get the idea. It’s an EXPERIMENT!
So, I just sort of winged this. Wang it? Mmm…no. I improvised. I preheated the oven to 375ºF. I busted out a mini-muffin pan and brushed the cups with butter. Then, I stamped out little pieces of dough just big enough to fit into the bottom and sides of each cup. I rolled each dough piece in cinnamon sugar (never said these were healthy, homies) and then pressed them into cups.
Then, I basically went a little bit crazy. I dropped a couple of chocolate chips here, a dollop of peanut butter there, a little jelly, a few more chocolate chips, a little malted milk powder because I’m wild. You get the idea. Here’s a visual if you’re terrified of the process:
Then, I covered the tops of most of them (ran out of dough, sadly) with more dough, and cut tiny slits in each so I wouldn’t be dealing with baby pie explosions for days afterward. Then, I sent these into the oven for 12 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through.
I knew they were ready when the tops were golden brown and the filling was bubbling out a little bit. (Btw, sorry for the conversational tone instead of the instructional one guys. I haven’t fully taken ownership of this post yet, which I know is unhealthy, but I’ll totally work on all of that later, promise.) After about ten minutes of cooling in the pan, I popped the pies out and let them cool completely on a cutting board.
Some of you might remember that I made a mini-s’mores pie with leftover pie dough last summer. That one served as the inspiration for these minis, which, um, RULED. I want to say my favorite was the PB&J one I made, but I can’t. They were all so good. It seems almost impossible to go wrong when your base is a buttery, flaky, sugary crust.
I think I almost like these more than normal-sized pie because they made me feel like I had my very own pies that were just for me and no one else, (ok, fine, and my boyfriend who ate a bunch of them too) and sometimes it feels good to be selfish. Though these do seem like the exact sort of thing I should be making for dinner party guests, whenever I decide to rejoin the land of the living, breathing humans. I’ll get on that. Eventually. (Most likely)
Sad Shibow 