Apple Pie Cookies

Happy apple pie season! Why are mini things so cute? # 272: Apple Pie Cookies

We just had the prettiest gloomy weather hike through Plitvice Lakes National Park today and one of these lil pies would have been the perfect snack!

Don’t you love the rare weekend mornings when you don’t have any plans or chores? I had a gloriously free morning before leaving on our trip and spent it playing with pie dough and making mini lattices to show off apples from my parents’ yard.

It’s been weird not having a kitchen for the past few weeks, and I’m already dreaming about fall flavors. About to make a salted maple and pumpkin mess when I get home!

Whipped out my favorite hand pie crust for these:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
12 TBs chilled butter
1/4 cups ice water

It’s super soft, so it’s worth getting out the food processor. Weirdly enough, I’ve found that I tend to overwork this recipe if I mix it by hand! There always seem to be an endless amount of hidden pockets of flour.

While the dough is napping in the fridge, time to make the smallest batch of apple pie filling you’ve ever seen. Mini pies = filling made with just two cute apples.

Have you ever thought about the dizzying amount of ways to combine apples and sugar? Apple sauce, apple jam, apple jelly, apple pie filling…

All have varying proportions of water, fruit and sugar, and the fruit is either in chunks or pureed, but they all follow the same basic steps. Mix sugar, water, apples and spices and cook til the pectin works it’s magic. The carbohydrate works overtime, building a structure to capture the liquid til the texture is thick and luscious.

With pie filling, it’s just enough to glaze the fruit with cinnamon-y goodness and to keep them from tumbling out of their lattice cocoon.

Diamonds are fun and fancy, but next time I’m definitely doing circles and using a cookie cutter.

I was able to squeeze a little more filling into these than normal hand pies, since they didn’t need space for sealing the edges. Yay!

So shiny! ✨

Mini lattice time.

Snip snip. Just realizing now another (possibly more efficient) way: do the lattice over the whole rectangle and cut the diamonds afterwards. Not sure if it would be as neat and tidy? And it was really satisfying to do each one individually… Sounds like I have an excuse to go make a whole bunch more of these to test my theories out!