Cherry hand pies. They don't look it, but they are akin to home made Pop Tarts.
Part three of my August baking project (desserts with summer fruits) takes advantage of the abundance of sweet cherries that are flooding into markets this summer. I found out on NPR that there’s an oversupply of sweet cherries this season, due to a favorable growing season, so producers and grocery stores are trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
It may be bad news for cherry farmers, but it sounds like good news to me. Usually I think of cherries as a luxury, but Rainier Cherries been showing up at the Columbia Heights Giant for as little at $2 a pound.
My first impulse was to make a cherry pie but, as I wrote last week, the single studio life doesn’t exactly lend itself to pie baking. Pie, which doesn’t freeze well or keep well after a few days, requires a crowd. However, I saw that The Bitten Word had tried out a Martha Stewart recipe for tomato hand pies, and I wondered if I couldn’t adapt it for cherries.
The Bitten Word had a mixed experience with their hand pies. One of the problems was the crust to filling the ratio – the recipe calls for patting squares of the pastry dough into muffin tins and folding the corners over the top of the filling. It’s a nice decorative touch, but the pies ended up being all crust and no filling. The recipe also didn’t specify to butter the muffin tins, and the pies were almost impossible to dislodge.
Armed with this test case, I wondered if I couldn’t do better. First off, I buttered my muffing tins, and the pies slipped right out. I changed the execution slightly – instead of folding crust over the filling, I went for a small fluted edge and a couple decorative pastry strips. I also tried to roll the crust fairly thinly, to help the crust to filling ratio. And I added a little bit of shortening to the dough to help it crisp – a trick I learned from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Finally, I halved the recipe – although if you want a full dozen feel free to double it. After all, not everyone already has a freezer full of peach tartlets.
The finished product was still a little crust-heavy compared to a regular pie, but it wasn’t overwhelming. In fact, I think I might even like these hand pies more than regular pie. I love a good, crisp, flaky pie crust – especially when it’s just out of the oven and you can hear the butter in the crust sizzling. Because I baked the pies in muffin tins, the crust were really crisp and perfectly browned, and the cherry filling was sweet, tart, and fresh. The crust to filling ratio wasn’t exactly like a regular pie, but it was akin to eating a Pop Tart. But a really good, sweet, crispy, fresh, Platonic Pop Tart.
Best of all, the pies reheated extremely well – ten minutes in a toaster oven and they were almost as good as fresh-baked. Now find me a regular pie recipe that can do that!
Mmmm . . .
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