I told Edie I’d make her a cherry pie with fresh cherries.  I’ve long had the itch to make hand pies and thought this was the perfect opportunity to have at it.  I googled a few recipes, but figured, hey, it’s pie that fits in your hand.  I know how to make pie, so I will just use my regular crust recipe and make them hand sized.

Turns out I only had one stick of butter, which was not enough for a whole crust.  I decided that since I was making a small batch of hand pies, I could do a half batch of crust and that would work.

The result I was going for looked like this, straight off the Bon Appetit website:

However, my dough was not properly behaving.  I suspect I put too much butter in it.  Although, let’s be honest here, I’m not exactly known for my abilities to roll out a decent pie crust.  As I was struggling with the crust, Edie came into the kitchen.  I was on the phone with T, so I have a witness to the following conversation.

“What are you doing?  This is not how you do hand pies.  What did you do to that crust?  Move, I’m going to try to fix this.  I cannot fix this.  Omigod.” and so forth as she attempted to fix, then walked away.  My pie crust savior deemed the mess unsalvageable.

Yeah, not exactly like the picture from Bon Appetit.

I realized my ‘hand pies’ were going to be a sticky, oozy mess if I just slapped them on a cookie sheet in the oven in that condition, which is when I came up with this brilliant fix.

I grabbed some of my mini cake tins and dropped the wannabe hand pies into them.  Technically, they were small enough to fit in your hand, although at this point, Edie kept telling me to STOP calling them hand pies, because they weren’t hand pies, they were never going to be hand pies.  There was also a mini-rant about how recipes are there for a reason, they are not always suggestions and sometimes one should consider following them. The proper technique for hand pies (according to my daughter) should be made with dough that has been cut into small circles, folded over and had the edges pinched.  Clearly, the recipe I looked at was a hack job.  I cannot properly convey the tone of voice and eye rolls that came with this, but if you’ve ever lived with a twelve year old girl, especially one that takes her baked goods very seriously, is a far better baker than you and has described the taste of bakery buttercream frosting with food dye it in as ‘a computer threw up in my mouth’,  then you can probably picture it.

Turns out the only ice cream in the house were Klondike bars, so a quartered one served as the à la mode topping.  They definitely were not pretty, but they were pie, or at least, a semblance of pie, and they were good.

Just don’t call them hand pies.