Tried it Tuesday: Pie Cookies

Yesterday we were invited to a neighbor's house for a Fourth of July Barbecue. Not wanting to show up empty handed, I looked around to see what I could make and kept coming back to a pie. I love making pies! Pies can be a mess though and only go so far with a crowd. 

And then I remembered some pins I'd seen in the past few years. Pie Cookies. That sounded yummy and easy and I figured that'd be perfect. Kids eat cookies great, they require little serving utensils, and it'd help the pie stretch more to give everyone a bite. 

So I searched on Pinterest for "pie cookie" and a plethora of pins popped up. Most of them were apple pie cookies, but I did see a few cherry or strawberry pie cookies as well. I opened up 5 of the recipes at random and read through the instructions and found they all were basically the same. 

Roll out the dough. Cover in pie filling. Top with dough. Bake. Stuff your face. 

I could do that. 

I used my normal pie recipe and did a double batch so I'd have enough for a bottom crust and a top crust.  All the recipes said to use your favorite recipe or buy the pre-made dough from the store. Either is fine!

If you are a video kind of person, the video below will explain the rest of what I did (and next time I'll dig out my tripod! I've totally got to work on my video skills if I'm going to do more of these-and make sure it's not a shaky hands day for Cameron). If you're not a video person (like me!) and would prefer to read, just skip and I'll explain what I did!

Once I had my dough rolled out I sliced one into thin strips for the lattice top. I tried to go with 1/2" strips so that the lattice pattern would be visible on the cookies. After the crust dough was all prepped, it was time to add on the pie filling. I was pretty sure one can of filling was going to be too much, but it fit well and spread out much more thin than I thought it would.

And then it was time for the lattice top. I forgot I don't like doing lattice tops. So time consuming and frustrating, lol. But, I got it on and done. And then it came time to cut the cookies. 

I was sure this would be one of a few places where problems would arise. It just didn't seem like it'd cut neatly without the filling oozing out all over. But I was wrong! They cut nicely and the top and bottom stuck together well! 

But then I ran into a problem I hadn't thought about. All the in-between pieces of crust. Normally with cookies I could just squish it back together and re-roll it, but now it had apply pie goop all in it. So much pie crust and filling there wasted. :( I used my 3" round cutter and got 11 cookies out it. 

I went to pull out the parchment paper to keep the mess contained and found we were out! So tin foil had to do. It worked, but not as good as parchment paper would have. I plopped the cookies on the pan with a metal spatula and then put them in the oven at 475. 

This is where I expected the next mess to come from. I was sure that the filling was going to leak out the sides and create a horrible goopy mess. But when I opened the oven about  minutes later I was shocked. There was little mess! They'd worked! Perfectly! They popped off the foil easy and went to the cooling rack intact. I couldn't believe it! 

But then I had the problem that I only had 11 cookies to take to a barbecue. So I decide to try a second batch, only mix it up a little. I did the double crust again, but this time I didn't cut the 2nd layer into strips, I left it intact. And for the filling I opened up a jar of my homemade blackberry prickly pear jelly and spread a good thick layer over the crust. Once the jelly was spread out I then put the top crust on and pulled out my 1 1/2" cookie cutter. I got way more cookies out of that and had much less waste. Before popping them in the oven I cut a slit in the top of each cookie, and even took a fork to some of the edges to try and seal them together and make them look more pie-ish. 

These leaked a little more than the apple pie cookies, but I made sure to take them off the pan and foil and transfer them to a cooling rack immediately after pulling them out of the oven so that the leaked jelly didn't have time to adhere the cookies to the foil. 

These ones were a HUGE hit and were gone well before the apple pie cookies. And fast enough that I realized that I never got a nice styled finished picture of them, darn it! But real life shots are always good, right? 

So, a pin (or set of pins) that I expected to be problematic totally turned out! And they were yummy!! I think I'll make more of these more often!