Mini Apple Pielets

Last Saturday night was a night for the record books. I actually baked. And baked. And baked. These things took me forever to make (because I'm so incredibly slow), but they were fun and I really enjoyed my time in the kitchen.

Our church had a potluck lunch on Sunday and we were assigned to bring a dessert. We don't attend the potlucks regularly, so this was a big thing for me...to cook for an army of sorts. My definition of an army is more than 2. So...the big question was what to bake. I could have done cookies and brownies but that's my usual "baking from a box" and I didn't want to do that since I was actually preparing ahead of time.

That's when I went to Bakerella, my favorite baking site. She had done some mini pies on a stick back in August, and I was inspired by the mini pies, only I didn't want to include the sticks. I was also inspired by this gorgeous, chilly fall weather we're having and wanted to do something with apples, so there it was. The only thing I needed was a recipe. All of the apple pie recipes I found were for a full-sized pie and included large slices of the apple, but I knew my little pies couldn't handle that, so...here's what I did.

I started out with Braeburn apples. Here they are, lined up and ready to perform.

I cored, sliced, and peeled the apples.

Here they are naked, in all their glory. You can see that some are already starting to turn brown. This took me some time to do because as I said before, I'm extremely slow but detailed. Next time, I will keep the apple slices in a pot of water with some lemon juice to keep them fresher, but it really didn't matter since they were being covered and going directly to the oven.

Then, I used my chopper (my Pampered Chef one that I don't ever want to live without) to make quick work of them so they would fit into my tiny little pielets. I added butter, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt to the apples and it was quite tasty! I could have feasted on this mixture alone. (In fact, I had so much left over that Mountain Man consumed some while I finished baking.)

I put the mixture aside and began preparing my pie-lets. I could have made my own dough, but I was lazy and went to Safeway. I found this darling little apple cookie-cutter at Ben Franklin and what could be better for mini apple pielets than a mini apple cookie-cutter?!

I rolled the store-bought generic brand dough out a little to make more pies and I got 48 pielets (that's tops & bottoms) out of 2 packages (of two 9-inch pie rounds each).

I added the apple mixture to the middle, topped it with another apple, pinched the sides together and forked the edges.

I then brushed the tops with egg white to give them that pretty, rustic "Martha Stewart" finish.

And now, without further adieu, I present the pielet masterpieces....

Well, okay...so they're not masterpieces yet, but they turned out pretty and rustic and intended. There's still some perfecting to do, as the ratio of dough to apple mixture ratio was still a little much for me. I'm going to try something else tomorrow. (Errr....now, officially "today.")

Off to bed. We have a long day of working around the house tomorrow.

Tata!