The girls and I baked these cherry hand pies a few days ago. So, so good! I was reminded about hand pies when I came across Amy Karol's rhubarb hand pies on pinterest the other day. We've made blueberry hand pies (inspired by her Angry Chicken post), and I would so love to make the rhubarb ones just as soon as I see rhubarb for sale, but hadn't attempted a cherry version until now.
We used a slightly modified version of my cherry pie recipe. Two cans of sour pie cherries instead of three (plus the juice from one can) and only 3/4 cup of sugar.
This time, though, I cooked the cherry pie filling over the stovetop first. I wanted the filling to be properly thickened before I spooned it onto the pie dough. Also, I wasn't sure the shorter baking time that the small hand pies warranted would be enough to cook the filling.
The pie dough is the same, but you could use any pie dough, including purchased or even puff pastry (as we do for turnovers).
Here, I have everything set out to assemble the hand pies, including rolled pie dough (Maia and Daphne each had their own pie dough to roll etc as well), cooked and cooled pie filling, egg wash with pastry brush, and some sugar for sprinkling on top.
First, we rolled the dough and cut it into smaller sections. Or, as with Daphne, above, made a pattern of cut marks across the pie dough with her butter knife.
We spooned our cherry pie filling into the center of each pie dough section.
I'm so glad I cooked the filling first, so it gelled together and didn't run all over the place when we were assembling these.
We folded the dough over the filling and crimped the edges with a fork (or, as with Daphne, poked little fork holes all over).
Maia brushed our hand pies with the egg wash.
And Daphne sprinkled sugar on the top of each.
We baked the hand pies at 425 F for 10 minutes then reduced the heat to 350 and baked for another 5 minutes in the case of these smaller pies and another 10 or so minutes in the case of some larger ones we made.
Our cherry hand pies (and many of our family cooking efforts) are rather ragtaggle and certainly not pinterest perfect, but they are so fun to make and utterly delicious. It's hard to go wrong with hand pies (or bread dough shapes). Even the ones that Daphne thoroughly cut and poked were wonderful.
