Mini Fruit Pies and Hand Pies #Recipe by @LibbyKlein

 Libby Klein Summer is fruit pie season! Whether you're celebrating Independence Day or at a family reunion picnic, what makes a better dessert than fruit pie? So many lovely fruits to choose from this time of year. I couldn't decide which one I like the best so I made five kinds. You'll need a mini pie pan like I have, or you can make hand pies like the kind that come individually wrapped in the convenience store.

Disclaimer - Read all your labels to make sure your ingredients are gluten-free. Gluten can be sneaky.

Mini Fruit Pies and Hand Pies

Serves: 6

 

Flaky Gluten-Free Pie Crust

Ingredients:

3 cups one-to-one Gluten-Free blend (or all-purpose flour)
1 tsp salt
1 and 1/2 cups good butter, cold
1 egg
1 TBSP neutral vinegar
1/3 cup ice water

Directions:

Blitz your flour and salt in the bowl of your food processor. Add your butter in cubes and blitz until the mixture is crumbly. Beat your egg and vinegar together. Blitz into the crumbly dough. Add your ice water in small amounts with the food processor on and watch the dough come together. Only add enough water to make a cohesive pastry dough. You don't want it too dry, but you should be able to pat it into a ball and flatten it to a disc pretty easily. Wrap the disk in plastic wrap and chill while you make the fillings. 

Fruit Fillings

Ingredients:

Either 

4 cups Strawberries, 

or 4 cups Blackberries, 

or 4 cups Peaches, peeled and sliced with a teaspoon of nutmeg

or 4 cups Blueberries with a pinch of mace

or a combination of the above

AND

1 cup sugar

3 Tbsp cornstarch

1 Tbsp lemon juice

Additional ingredients if you're making the hand pies.

1 egg for an egg wash pre-baking

1 cup confectioners sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1-2 Tbsp water

Directions:

Place 4 cups of the fruit of your choice in a saucepan. You can see that I like to add a little spice depending on the fruit. Add the sugar, cornstarch, and lemon juice. Cook on low until the fruit has rendered its juices and the mixture comes to a boil. Cook for a couple of minutes until the fruit mixture thickens. If you are using peaches, cook a couple minutes longer until they soften a bit. You just made pie filling. Set it aside to cool. What you don't bake in a crust you can use to top ice cream waffles, pancakes, etc.

  

Roll out your pastry dough and either cut into rounds for mini-pies
or cut to fit in your pie plate. 

Mini Pies

If you're using a pie plate for mini-pies, you'll want to blind back the shell. Prick with a fork or use pie weights and bake the shell at 350 degrees for twenty minutes. Then fill each shell with your pie filling and pop back in the oven for another 20 minutes. The filling will get all bubbly and the edges of your pie crust will brown. Remove from the oven and let cool before serving.

Hand Pies

If you're making min-pies like I did here, just be sure not to roll the dough too thick. These small hand pies don't hold a lot of filling and you don't want them to be pop-tarts. At least not today.

Transfer your rounds to a parchment-lined baking sheet. Top each one with a spoonful of pie filling just in the middle. Run the rolling pin over the next cut-out to make it slightly larger than the bottom. Stretch it over the fruit filling and crimp the edges together. 

Beat that extra egg with 1 TBSP water to make an egg wash. Brush over the top crust of the hand pies. Bake at 350 degrees for twenty minutes or until your crust is golden brown. 

When cool, make your vanilla glaze by mixing together the confectioners sugar with the vanilla and just enough water to make a smooth and slightly runny icing. Place your hand pies on a baker's rack over sheets of parchment paper or foil. Spoon the finished glaze over your hand pies. The glaze will coat the top of the pies and set to a nice finish.

 Poppy McAllister discovers that gluten-free Halloweens can scare up another case of murder in the latest installment of this delightful culinary B&B mystery series! - Kirkus Reviews

Poppy is none too pleased when her B&B is coerced into participating in the Cape May Haunted Dinners Tour during Halloween season. Though her knack for finding dead bodies has given the place a spooky reputation, the Murder House is a completely undeserved nickname. At least it used to be . . .
 
While Poppy wrangles with some guests who can’t stop squabbling with each other—including a paranormal researcher, a very quirky pet psychic who freaks out her portly Persian, and an undercover tabloid reporter eager to catch her staff in a lie—one of them winds up facedown in a plate of tiramisu. And now she has bigger worries than getting her house TP’d . . .
 
Includes Recipes from Poppy’s Kitchen!
 

Libby Klein grew up in Cape May, NJ where she attended high school in the '80s. Her

classes revolved mostly around the Culinary sciences and Drama, with one brilliant semester in Poly-Sci that may have been an accident. She loves to drink coffee, bake gluten-free goodies, collect fluffy cats, and translate sarcasm for people who are too serious. She writes from her Northern Virginia office where she serves a very naughty black smoke Persian named Sir Figaro Newton. You can keep up with her shenanigans by signing up for her Mischief and Mayhem Newsletter on her website. www.LibbyKleinBooks.com/Newsletter/