Keeping my Eyes on These Mini Apple Pies

I love me some apple pie. Of all the pies out there, apple, in my book, is the king. But you know, it’s hard to get apple pie, other than special occasions because apple pie is not the kind of thing one always has on hand, especially if there is only one person in the house who could dig on apple pie often enough to keep one in the fridge, and even then, weight-wise, you are just asking for trouble.

So I was pretty psyched when I found a recipe for these individual apple pies on the boards. I figured they would be good for a couple of snacks, and then I could freeze the others for a later date. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

Ingredients:

eight cups of apples into small 1/2in bits

12 tablespoons of flour
1 1/2c of sugar
4 heaping teaspoons of cinnamon
1/4-1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg (depending on how much you like nutmeg…you could also leave it out)

4 tablespoons of chilled butter cut into 24 equal portions.  
two boxes of pilsbury pie crusts (four chilled NOT frozen crusts) 

Stir apples together with the next four ingredients, until apples completely coated. Unroll one pie crust and cut out 24 circles.  Line each cup of muffin cup with a tiny pie crust, pinching the edge of the dough around the top edge of the cup.  Then gently fill the crusts with apple mixture until slightly mounded and push the crusts down into the cup the rest of the way. Next put a dab of butter on each pie. Cover as desired with left-over dough.  Brush with melted butter and bake at 400 for 18 to 22 minutes.

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Looked pretty easy, so I got to work, though I changed a few things…

I didn’t want to make 24 pies, so I cut the recipe in half, which was very easy to do. I took six medium-sized apples (I used Golden Delicious, but any apple would do) and cut them up into small cubes.

Then I put them into a large bowl along with the sugar, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg.

I mixed them for a while, but the sugar mixture refused to combine smoothly with the other ingredients.

Next, I took a pre-made pie crust and cut out 12 circles. I had to roll them a bit thinner to get them to fit into my muffin pan, but that was just because of the cookie cutter size.

These were placed into the muffin pan, and filled with the apple mixture. I found no need to push down any dough at this point.

A little butter was then placed on top of each.

Then, instead of putting a crust on top, I decided to go with a crumb topping, stealing the one I had used for the NY Style Crumb Cake a few months ago.

1/3 cup granulated sugar (2 2/3 ounces)
1/3 cup dark brown sugar (2 2/3 ounces)
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon table salt
8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick), melted and still warm
1 3/4 cups cake flour (7 ounces)

Whisk sugars, cinnamon, salt, and butter in medium bowl to combine. Add flour and stir with rubber spatula or wooden spoon until mixture resembles thick, cohesive dough; set aside to cool to room temperature, 10 to 15 minutes.

Each pie was topped with a little of that.

They then baked in the oven for 20 minutes, though I started checking on them after 15.

The taste was pretty good, but it was more cinnamon than apple (not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

I’m not sure if the apple pieces were too small, or there was too much sugar, but inside, the apples kind of disintegrated, so that the texture was more like pecan pie than apple. Again, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but next time I will probably cut back a little further on the sugar and cut the apples a little bit bigger.

You could also dribble a little caramel icing on these, if you really want to build The Bomb. Thanks for stopping by!