Friday, November 29, 2013

KT Baked It: Pastries

Happy Friday! Hoping that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration with family and friends that included delicious food!

This year Eric and I had Thanksgiving dinner with his family. The majority of the meal was made by my brother and sister-in-law, but everyone else in the family brought a dish to contribute. My sister-in-law asked Eric and I to bring a dessert to share. Thanksgiving dessert growing up was always my mom's famous pumpkin cheesecake and my grandmothers cherry cream cheese pie, both recipes I'm not ready to inherit because my mom get such joy from making those desserts for us. So, instead of making one of those desserts, I decided that I wanted to make some kind of pie especially since that is a pretty traditional Thanksgiving dessert. I don't like pumpkin pie, and my friend Sara and I recently made a pecan pie together (which I'm still waiting for her to post on her cooking blog!). That being the case, my mom suggested that I make a cherry cranberry pie. Fantastic!

As I was preparing to make my pie, I realized a couple of things. One, I don't have a ceramic pie dish. Two, I wanted to make a smaller dessert since I knew that there would likely be a bunch of other treats there. The answer was pretty obvious: individual pastries!

Here's how Eric and I (yes, this is a Katy & Hubby Did It) made our pastries:

First, you need to determine what type(s) of pie filling you want to make. We made two types of pies, with leftover filling to to spare. The cherry cranberry and cherry blueberry fillings would have been enough for 12 or more pies based on the size we made. Just a thought.

Cherry Cranberry Pie Filling
1cup canned cherry pie filling
1cup fresh cranberries, halved
1Tbl Tapioca flour (for thickening; you can also use corn starch)
1Tbl granulated sugar

Cherry Blueberry Pie Filling
1cup canned cherry pie filling
1cup frozen blueberries, thawed
1Tbl Tapioca flour
1Tbl granulated sugar

To make the filling, we added the cherry pie filling to the fruit.

 













Next, we added the tapioca flour and sugar, then mixed everything together.




To make our pastries, we used the container for our mini food processor to make impressions in the rolled-out pie dough just like using a cookie cutter. With that size circle, we were able to make 5 cut-outs on each rolled out pie dough. 5 x 4 = 20 with 2 parts for each pastry = 10 total pasties. Look at those remedial math skills.











After we cut out the individual pastry pieces, we decided to one two different shapes to identify which pastry was which. For the cherry blueberry pastries, we drew a heart on the top half using the tip of a knife. For the cherry cranberry pastries, we cut out 4 small petals to make it look like a traditional pie. To put the pies together, we put a spoonful of pie filling into the center of one of the pastry circles. Next, we put the top part on top and pinched the sides of the top and bottom together. We used the edges of a fork, and pressed the edges into the top of the dough around the edge of the pastry.





After we assembled the pastries, we brushed a whisked egg over the top and sprinkled sugar over the pastry. We baked them at 350 for about 12 minutes each, or until the edges were browning. 
Very cute, and easy to make!

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