Mini Pies

Are you ready for some dessert?  This year I made mini pies along with a regular apple butter pumpkin pie.  They turned out great, so I thought I ‘d share.

   I think everyone must have their favorite apple pie and pumpkin pie recipes.  So you should use them.  If not I’ll share mine.  I am short on pictures because, well, I don’t remember why.  I just looked at my pictures and there weren’t many.  Oh well.  Start off by chopping up your apples.  For normal pie I usually do thin slices, but for this I thought chunks would be fun.   Put them into a bowl and add lemon juice, flour, sugar, and cinnamon.  Mix that together really well. Next pull out these super cute jars.  When I saw them earlier this fall I instantly thought pies!  However, I talked myself out of purchasing them.  Then more recently Kellee and I somehow got to discussing this idea and I decided to make pies for Thanksgiving. Pull out your pie crust.  I did store bought this time, but I have a crust recipe I love.  It’s better than store bought.  It doesn’t matter what you use. It all works.  Employ your 8 year old daughter since she loves to bake and cook. For the tops of the pies we took the lids of the mason jars and cut out circles for all of the jars. Take the remaining crust and press it into the jars.  Neat, huh? Once you’ve got all of your crusts in your jars add the filling you just made.  We had a little fun with the tops.  I decided to do a cute little lattice design.  Just cut strips out of the circles you cut out earlier.  Bake them in the oven and here’s how they turn out. We made few pumpkin pies as well.  Aren’t they just darling?  Everyone got their own little pie.

Apple Pie Filling 

• 6 cups apples
• 1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice
• 1 Tablespoon Flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

Mix all together.  Put filling into pie crusts.  Put a dob of butter onto each mini pie.  Bake at 425 degrees for about 40 minutes. Apple Butter Pumpkin Pie

• 1 cup Apple Butter
• 1 cup pumpkin
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp nutmeg
• 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp ginger
• 3 eggs beaten
• 3/4 cup evaporated milk

I adapted this recipe from one of my favorite cooks, Paula Deen.

Seventy Pounds of Apples

When I got all of those tomatoes I also picked up some apples-seventy pounds of apples.  I couldn’t pass up a good deal and we like apples!What does one do with so many apples?  We made applesauce and apple butter.  Then I let Rebecca make an apple pie.  That was good! This simple little apple corer/slicer is a great little tool.  It helps the process of making applesauce a little quicker.  You want things to go as quick as possible when you have 70 pounds of apples. Once we sliced the apples we boiled them all to soften them up. Then the girls got to have all the fun.  They tag teamed together putting the softened apples into the Kitchen Aid and smashing them down the strainer.  This attachment is the best for applesauce.  You don’t have to peel the skins off the apples.  It gets rid of them for you. .

 

The attachment spits the applesauce out one end and the peels out the other.  It’s great.  We do this right over the sink so the peels can go straight into the garbage disposal.  This makes for easier clean up later.Here is my cheesy Thomas. He wanted to help to, but for now it was more of a two person job, so he watched until the girls got tired.  It takes awhile to get through all the apples, but it is definitely worth the work.

  

Finally it’s Thomas’s turn.  He loved helping.  He didn’t want to stop, but we had to.  We ran out of apples.

So I forgot to take photos of the whole jarring and canning process of the applesauce as well as the end result, but you can look at some old photos if you’d like.  You can also refer back to my tomato canning for canning photos.  Well I’m off to search the ads for some more apple sales.  Until next time make it a great day!

Apple Butter and More Applesauce

With the extra apples I purchased I was able to make more applesauce and some apple butter. To make apple butter I filled up my crockpot with applesauce, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and a little nutmeg. It's all about taste. You'll know how much to put in by taste. Then I just let everything cook together all day. The smell in the kitchen was great. It was like apple pie was baking all day.

After everything has simmered together all day I just put it into jars and stuck the jars in a water bath. Done! It was so easy and the kids love helping.

Apples

I couldn't resist the urge to make more applesauce and apple butter, so I went out and bought more apples. They were still pretty cheap so why not? I got home and set the bags on the floor in the kitchen. I figured I would get around to making applesauce the next day and would just leave them out. Well, that was a bad idea. Some how a little mouse, or David, got into them. He couldn't eat just one. I think he was on his way to trying out every apple until he got caught.