Pumpkin Pie Bites

Created by Jeanne Wood and Joanne Bellamy, and they are DELICIOUS!

Soo I didn't take pictures as we were making them, so the pictures that you will see, are taken after the fact. But hopefully, you'll get my drift. Keep in mind, that the methods have yet to be perfected, but I'll tell you how we made ours, and what could be done differently (I'll put it in bold font)

The Sweet Dough recipe made roughly two and a half dozen pumpkin pie bites: (You could get 3 dozen if you use a slightly smaller cookie cutter to form the circles.)

3c Flour

1c Powdered Sugar

1/2 t. Salt

1c + 2T Butter (chilled)

2 Large Eggs, beaten

Mix the dry ingredients in large bowl. Cut in the butter. (It may be easier to pre-cut the butter into small-ish chunks and then use the pastry cutter to do the rest). Stir in the eggs till everything is incorporated.

Split the dough in half. You'll stick one half in the fridge to let harden while you're working with the other half. Roll the dough out till 1/4 inch thick.

1) Cutting the dough:

We used the big plastic cup shown, which is a smidge bigger than a pint glass. Using the plastic cup, we got 30 bites. Using the pint glass might give you 36 bites.

2) Making the dough forms:

Take a circle of dough and push it down into a muffin pan. Make sure you get the dough to be even around the top edge. Once the dough was in place, we used an espresso tamper to make sure the dough was perfectly round and secure at the bottom.

(I just wanted to show how the tamper will fit down into the mold. Make sure you're doing this once the dough is in the muffin pan, and not on top of a Tupperware lid ;) )

Once you've got all the slots in your muffin pan full of dough forms, pop it in the freezer while you do the next batch. This should give the forms about 30 minutes of chilling time. Basically, you want the forms to be nice and hard - like rock hard, actually. This will keep them from shrinking in the oven. After they are nice and frozen, take them out and get your foil party hat on - because this is where the fun begins! (or not so much..)

3) The foil:

Cut some foil squares. I think I must have cut them to be 3x3. Spray one side with cooking spray and put that side down. Make sure you press the foil down into the dough pretty hard - along the bottom, the corner, and the sides of the dough form. This will keep the dough from getting all puffy and full of bubbles, rendering your crust useless. Once all the forms are lined with greased foil, pop these bad boys into the oven while you get the next batch ready. You'll pre-bake the shells at 375 for about 10 minutes. They don't need to be browned when you take them out. They will brown during the final step.

The results of taking the time to do the foil lining paid off. However, Jeanne is thinking that it would be okay to skip this step, and the pre-baking of the shells, altogether. She's thinking that you can make the dough forms, fill them with the pumpkin pie filling, and go straight to the baking process. It would be worth a try, but we don't know how it would actually turn out. The concern with this would be that the crust doesn't have a chance to fully cook all the way through, including the bottom. There's nothing worse than a soggy pie crust, Amen?

With that said: Once the shells are pre-baked, you'll spoon the filling in. We used a 1/4c measuring cup, and it did well. We would, however, fill them a little bit more after we saw how it settled in the oven and during the cooling process.

4) Baking

Once all the forms are filled with the pumpkin pie yumminess, stick them in the oven WITHOUT a foil cover for 15 minutes at 375 and then 15 minutes more WITH a foil covering. Make sure that the crust is lightly golden when you go to cover it. It should continue to get a little bit of color during the last 15 minutes.

5) Cooling

Take the little bites of heaven out of the oven. Keeping them in the muffin pan, place on a cooling rack, till they're room temperature, or until you just can't take in any longer. And then enjoy! (With a dollop of whipped cream on top, of course!)

Any questions?