The next time I say I’m going to make any sort of pastry or pie, remind me just how labor intensive it is to make the dough.
Today is week two of my baking experiment and I just finished making apple hand pies. “What,” you may ask, “are apple hand pies?”
Well, last week I was looking as my RSS feed and saw this delicious looking recipe (yes, I strayed from the”Joy of Cooking” already) for what were essentially mini apple pies. Scrolling through the pictures just made my mouth water, and when I showed them to hubby, he too became super interested. I’m a huge fan of pie. HUGE. So I thought, what could be better than bite-size morsels of pie?! And how hard could they be?
Read through the directions for making the dough and you’ll soon realize how misdirected I was. I started baking around 1pm and didn’t finish until about 4:30. That’s right. It took me about 3 and a half hours to make the pies. And it’s all because of the dough.
On two separate occasions, the dough has to be refrigerated for an hour. And then, it has to be refrigerated for another half hour! And that’s before I got to put the yummy apple filling in it and then, guess what? I get to refrigerate it for another half hour ( I cheated here and only did it for about 15 minutes). The dough, which is made with sour cream and flour and other dough requirements, gets really sticky when it warms up. Thus the incessant refrigeration in order to be able to handle it and move it from baking sheet to baking sheet.
However, if you do have the free time and are feeling a little adventurous, I recommend making them; the dough, when it’s finally filled with apple and baked, it absolutely delicious! I’ve already begun to think of other fillings I could use instead of apple: peaches, cherries. Even seasoned beef if you’re interested in a savory beef pie (it’s a Caribbean thing).
While the reward from that 3 and a half hour baking spree were quite tasty, I think next week I’m going to forego more pastry dough making and go for a cake of some sort.
Perhaps coconut or chocolate decadence… Perhaps a mix?
We’ll see…