Whewy, Monday was a rough day. Mondays are usually just another day for me, but this past one was a Monday Deluxe. Dead car battery. Angry readers. Changes of doctor appointments. Unhappy baby. Tired Moody Momma. Etc. Etc. Etc. Makes for a rough day. It was a day that called for pizza...lots of pizza. Pizza cheers me up. And Doughnuts. Sadly...I didn't have either, and the dead car battery made getting pizza (or even pizza ingredients to make it at home) a 40 mile round trip hike that I wasn't willing to take. I'd have even gone for a tiny little palm sized pizza, but alas...it was not to be. What do tiny pizzas look like you ask? I'll show you.
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| http://www.rhodesbread.com/recipes/view/2094 |
Don't those look yummy?! Mmm, I want one. And how cute?! You could use heart cookie cutters for valentines day, shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day, pumpkins for Halloween, etc. Perfect! I seriously want to try these out, but since I can't at this exact moment I'll show you a submission we received from Miriam and her adventure.
"I was having a little Christmas get together and thought these mini cookie cutter pizzas would be a great treat for the kids. Simple, just use Christmas cookie cutters to cut out shapes from pizza dough, add sauce, cheese, whatever. So I bought refrigerated pizza dough and rolled it out, cut shapes, then tried to lift the extra dough off, leaving the tree, candy canes, etc to be decorated. Only the cutters didn't cut through all the way. So it started stretching and tearing. And pizza dough is a little sticky. Yeah. I tried to lay it all down back where it was and re cut the shapes with a little more force. Come to find out, it only takes one little area to stick and things go wonky. So new plan, I will just redo it by smushing up the dough, flattening it back out, and recutting. Hmm, this worked better in my head! It was not universally flat, and I was struggling. So my husband stepped in to save the day. They didn't look THAT bad before going into the oven. However, the end result speaks for itself."
The Pinstrosity:
Not the pretty shapes from the original pin, but it's pizza. It doesn't have to be pretty to taste good (have you caught our theme on food yet? We'll pick good tasting and not so pretty over beautiful and inedible any day).
But what if you want beautiful and tasty? The key here lies in the original directions. The Pinterest caption wasn't wrong, it just wasn't complete. You do roll out the dough, cut it with cookie cutters, top it, and bake it...but there are a few steps in-between. The "pizza dough" in the original pin is actually Rhodes Roll dough.
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| http://www.rhodesbread.com/recipes/view/2094 |
Now really quick let me make sure you know we're not getting compensated by anyone to link to Rhodes or to tell you about them (we don't ever do those kind of posts). They are the authors of the recipe and the creators of the original pin image, so we link to them and use their directions.
So, in case you didn't just read the recipe I'll summarize. They have you take a thawed, but still cold, ball of dough, flatten it out to a 4 1/2" circle, and cut it with a cookie cutter which was dipped in flour. This is where Miriam first ran into some trouble. The cookie cutter didn't quite cut the dough all the way through. Rhodes' fix? Have a small knife handy to cut away the extra connected dough. You can see that here in their tutorial video:
So, in case you didn't just read the recipe I'll summarize. They have you take a thawed, but still cold, ball of dough, flatten it out to a 4 1/2" circle, and cut it with a cookie cutter which was dipped in flour. This is where Miriam first ran into some trouble. The cookie cutter didn't quite cut the dough all the way through. Rhodes' fix? Have a small knife handy to cut away the extra connected dough. You can see that here in their tutorial video:
Not too shabby!
If you watched the video and/or read the recipe, you also probably caught the fix to the problem of the dough puffing up during baking and pushing the toppings and sauce off. What is the fix? Pre-baking. Before you add sauce or toppings, you want to bake your dough shapes for 8-10
Lessons learned today? Pre-bake, and caption your Pinterest pins well!
Happy pizza creating!
Ooh! Now I want a Pinstrosity cookie cutter to make Pinstrosity Pizzas!
Marquette... You said bake for 8-10 inches... Don't you mean minutes?
ReplyDeleteThat's metric time.
DeleteShe's had a rough day! We knew she meant minutes.
DeleteInches, bahahaha. What a week. All in favor of never repeating this week again say aye. Aye! Thanks for catching that for me.
DeleteThe 8-10 inches thing made me giggle. :)
ReplyDeleteThey are cute little pizzas... seems like quite a bit more work so I wouldn't do it just for myself, but if I had a party, these would be cute.
I wonder if there are jumbo sized cookie cutters--ones that would make the pizzas about the size of a personal pan pizza instead.
I always pre-bake my pizzas, otherwise they get soggy from all the toppings. I don't know what premade dough is like, but mine is very soft and I stretch it with my palms in the pan. Makes sense not to try cutting any shapes from it!
ReplyDeleteFor foolproof quick "pizzas", you can use cutouts from toaster bread slices.
Using croissant dough that comes in those tubes would probably work really well. Just pat the seams back together when you unroll it so that you have a flat sheet to cut from.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little late to the game here, but you can also poke holes all over the crust with a fork before prebaking it and it gives the gases that would puff it up a place to escape and keeps it more flat. Another point, too, is that you can lay the dough out on the tray where you plan to cook it and pull the excess from around it, then pull the excess off instead of trying to move a cut shape from board/counter/whatever to your pan or stone to bake. My boys got Star Wars cookie cutters and we did Millenium Falcon and Tie Fighter pizzas. :-D
ReplyDelete