Mini Strawberry Pies

Word on the street is that 2011 is the year of the pie. As someone who isn’t a pie enthusiast, I’m not overly excited about that fact, but I’m not running away screaming either. Maybe 2011 is the year that I’ll learn to appreciate pie outside of Thanksgiving.

Despite my indifference to pie, I planned on making reuben hand pies for St. Patrick’s Day. I made the pie dough, I bought corned beef and sauerkraut, and then I spent all afternoon drinking Irish beer and watching basketball with a bunch of dudes. Rolling out pie dough when I was a few Guinesses deep sounded a lot less appealing than ordering a pepperoni and banana pepper pizza, so the pies got pushed back to the following day. The following day, for one reason or another, the pie-making got pushed back again. And again. And again, until finally I realized that I would be throwing away two whole sticks of butter if I let the pie dough go bad, and that was not something that I could live with.

Unfortunately reuben hand pies were no longer as appealing as they had been the week before, and thanks to a late March snowstorm, we were craving comfort food in the form of chicken enchilada bake, not little reuben pies. But what’s comfort food without dessert? I flipped through a few cookbooks to find pie ideas for dessert, and a recipe for fruit galettes was my top pick. Spring snowstorms are a bummer, but making fruit-filled desserts are a great reminder that warmer weather is approaching. Giant strawberries were on sale at Whole Foods, so I picked up some of those for the filling, and after fiddling around with the dough for a while, I decided that mini pies made in muffin cups would be easier than making galettes. These were super simple to make, and you could easily play around with the fillings or the dough. I baked a few empty pie crusts to fill with chocolate pudding, but the pudding didn’t set quite as well as we’d hoped, so chocolate soup served in pie crusts it is!

Mini Strawberry Pies

Inspired by Tartine

1/2 recipe pie dough
A few cups of strawberries, whole or sliced
Brown sugar, to taste

1/2 recipe of pie dough should yield 8-10 mini pies in large muffin tins or 12-14 in regular muffin tins

After chilling, roll out the pie dough on a lightly floured surface until it’s about 1/4-inch thick. Use a biscuit cutter or a glass to cut out circles. Re-roll the dough scraps and repeat.

Place the circles of dough in lightly greased muffin tins. For giant muffin tins like the ones pictured above, you might want to roll out the cut circles a little more so that the dough covers the bottom and goes up the sides a little. Alternatively, you could use ramekins instead of muffin tins, which would let you avoid the nerve-racking step of scooping out the pies for serving.

Add a little brown sugar to the berries. The amount you need will vary based on how sweet the fruit is, but I used 2-3 tablespoons for maybe 3 cups of strawberries.