J is for Jar Lid Pies

Some people just have too much time on their hands.

How else would you explain using mason jar lids as a pie pan? 

Pie = good
Little tiny pie baked in a jar lid = not enough pie

BUT LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE!

http://consumerqueen.com/
my-royal-kitchen/mason-jar-lid-pies?m

The recipe said you could make your own crust and filling, but the writer used refrigerated crust and canned pie filling for hers, so what's good enough for her was good enough for me! I happened to have three crusts in the refrigerator, leftover from when I bought too many at Christmas, and I picked up a can of apple pie filling and a box of jar lids (I knew we had some jar lids in the basement, but it was way easier to buy new ones that look for the old ones and that's called working efficiently, my friends).

Box o' lids. Two piece kind.

Flip the inner lid over so that the rubber side
is down and shiny side up and spray with
cooking spray.

I rolled the refrigerated pie crust a little thinner (little trick I learned from my mom) and found a bowl slightly bigger than the jar lid to use as a cutting guide for the individual crusts. Per directions, I cut the top crusts slightly smaller.

My first real issue with this project was how few little circles you could cut from one pie crust. (The answer is three.) I squeezed a couple of smaller circles in there for top crusts, then had a WHOLE BUNCHA dough scraps. I made 7 mini pies total, and it took three of the full sized to make them. AND I made one with a lattice top, because there wasn't enough dough to cut the very last circle. Had I used homemade dough, I could have re-rolled the scraps and made some more circles, but the consistency of the processed refrigerated pie crusts didn't lend itself to re-rolling. 

I put 3 tablespoons of apple pie filling (and I chopped up the apples in the filling so they would fit inside the jar lids better) in each crust, brushed the edges with water, and topped with a smaller crust. I followed the directions and used a fork to crimp the edges of the first couple of pies I made, but I wasn't very successful with getting it to crimp together without cutting through the whole damn crust (I think you can figure out which one I'm talking about by looking at the photo below). For the rest of them, I crimped the edges with my fingers like I would a normal sized pie.

Filled, crimped, sprinkled with
cinnamon and sugar and ready to bake.

Six little baked pies.

This leads me to what turned out to be the problem with baking a pie in a jar lid: as the pies baked, the outside edges of the crust drooped down, making the whole thing look like a flattened chef's hat. I thought I took a picture with a side view of the pies, but apparently I was mistaken; pretend this is the pie:

Now picture it flatter....

A regular pie pan does not have straight sides like a jar lid does; they flare slightly and have a rim around the top edge. Without that rim, the pie crust succumbed to gravity and flopped like, well, a chef's hat.

After letting them cool for a few minutes, they were easy to pop out of the jar lids by pushing the inner lid up.

I'm going to pretend this picture is not
sideways, and you do the same.

The verdict? It tasted delicious, because PIE.

My husband said it looked like an Easy Bake Oven pie.

He also agreed that it was delicious, because "how can you go wrong with apple pie filling, pie dough, and sugar and cinnamon?" You can't.

He couldn't get his head around why anyone would bother to bake itty bitty pies that were kind of a pain in the ass to make when you could make a big pie, but after his third little pie of the day (so much for them being good for portion control), he was asking if I could make them with a crumb topping next time, and maybe some time I would make little pecan pies and maybe pumpkin....

I'll give it a win.