We’ve been buying peaches in large quantities for the past month, and with every new batch of them, we swore we would make us some hand pies, and then every batch would ripen and we wouldn’t get around to it, because homemade pie dough requires multi-stage cooling techniques and time. Frankly, it’s not that we didn’t have the time, it’s just we always had something else to do, like… oh a new baby, perhaps?
So we broke it up into stages. I mixed the dough one night and stuck it in the fridge overnight, Rhiannon rolled some dough and cut up small circles while I watched Brooklynn, and then I formed the pies and baked them. I’ve never made a pastry crust from scratch before, and once we realized we had not one but two pastry blenders (compliments of a messy kitchen accessory drawer), we figured that it was something that needed to be done. Frozen butter, cut into flour, and rolled out.
Delicious.
Just a hint – when it says to put the butter in the freezer for an hour, it means an hour. Three hours in a chest freezer while out shopping will not cut it as you end up with butter chunks that snap into smaller pieces in a decidedly un-butterlike manner.
Yes, we stayed up too late last night waiting for the second batch to finish. Yes, we should have been in bed sleeping while the baby slept instead of salivating over pastry desserts. Yes, we didn’t really need the calories and…
Ok, who am I kidding. Pie is awesome. Pie you can pick up and eat with your hand on the go? Totally awesome.
Recipe from Smitten Kitchen – we used a cinnamon/sugar sprinkle rather than just a decorative sugar. My suggestion – if for whatever reason these last long enough that there are leftovers, don’t refrigerate them until completely cool. The impressive flakiness of homemade, fresh-out-of-the-oven pie crust was noticeably missing when cold as the moisture content in the filling condensed and damped the hand pie spirits of the little morsels. A few hours sitting out brought a little life back to them, but they never quite recovered. Still darn tasty, though.
