Pleasant Surprises in Pastry

This past weekend, I was rifling through the freezer and found, among other things, some pastry, pumpkin pie filling, and chocolate chip cookie dough (Lord knows how long that's been in there!) Anyhow, these frozen odds and ends had to be used up, and this is what happened...

There wasn't quite enough pumpkin filling to make an entire pie, so I figured mini pies might be a fun option. A muffin tin worked perfectly for this. Also, because pastry is pretty much solid butter, you don't have to worry about greasing the tin. The mini pies turned out like a charm, just needed a little teasing with a fork to get them out of the muffin compartments. :)

Pumpkin Pie Filling

Makes enough for one 8" pie or approximately 6 muffin-size pies

• 1 15 oz. can pumpkin

• 1 14 oz. can sweetened condensed milk

• 1 egg

• 3/4 tsp. cinnamon

• 1/2 tsp. each of ginger, nutmeg, and salt

Combine ingredients and mix well. Pour into pastry crust. Bake at 425°F until filling has set. Don't worry if it cracks a bit, that can be covered up with whipped cream later. ;)

Basic Short-Crust Pastry

Here's a good recipe from the

New York Times

.

And for the surprise cookie dough that was hiding in the back of the freezer... I only ever use the Blue Bonnet Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, available

here

.

I had only a tennis ball-size amount of cookie dough, but it was just enough to fill our smallest skillet. (I've wanted to make a skillet cookie for the longest time!) To make a cookie pie like this one, just roll out your pastry to the size of the skillet and trim to size with a scissors. Press the cookie dough into an even layer inside the pastry. Bake until the cookie dough puffs up and the pastry turns golden. If you use the toothpick test for done-ness, the toothpick should come out mostly clean. It's ok if the cookie is a bit on the gooey side. We don't want a rock-hard bake on this. :)

Served warm with a generous scoop of ice cream, this cookie pie is hard to beat. If you want to enjoy it at a later time, be sure to remove the pie from the skillet (food can pick up a metallic tinge from cast iron.) However, I doubt that this dessert will sit around too long. Hehe.

So the moral of the story - "Waste not, want not." With a little bit of ingenuity, we can turn scraps into a positively scrummy dessert.

Thank you for stopping by,

Eva