Pie!

Cassie went on a field trip to an apple orchard earlier this week and came back with one small red and green apple.

“Mama! Let’s make pie!”

How do you explain to a five-year-old that one small apple will not make a whole pie?  You don’t.  You figure out how to make pie instead.

We have a couple of kids’ cook books at home, so we dug through them until I found a recipe for jam tarts.  We used the basic recipe for the crust and rolled and cut out two crusts about 6 inches across.  These went into two of the cups of an extra large muffin tin I have.

“Mama, that’s not a pie plate!”

“No, it’s a mini-pie plate.  If we had more apples, we’d make more crusts and fill up the other four cups.  But we have one apple so we’re only making two mini-pies.”

I crossed my fingers and watched the cogs turn in her brain as she mulled that over.

“Okay.  I like mini-pies!”

Then we chopped up the one small apple and added it to a mix of brown sugar, butter, dried cranberries and walnuts.  I figured if we used plenty of dried cranberries and walnuts, we could get away with just one apple.

“Mama, how come we’re adding so much stuff to the apple?”

“It’ll add extra flavor and make the pie taste more yummy.”

“Okay. I like yummy pies!”

Once we had the pies filled, we still had some leftover scraps of pastry so I pulled out some cookie cutters and we made decorative tops for the pies.  This went over very well, especially since we have fairy, star, dragonfly and bumble bee cookie cutters.

“Yeah!  We made fairy pies!”

“Yes we did, sweetie.”

The pies went into the over for about 25 minutes and came out looking scrumptious.  I let Cassie pull out some livid pink decorator icing and we added that to the pie crusts.  Then Sam woke up from her nap and Michael came and we all headed out to the elementary school for open house.  All evening, Cassie talked about how much she wanted pie.

“Well, sweetie, when we get home, we’ll all have some pie.  You and Sam can share one pie and Daddy and I will share the other.”

Only that wasn’t what happened.  Cassie decided she had to have a pie all to herself, and then Sam decided she had to have a pie all to herself and that just left this one teeny-tiny jam tart I had made with the final leftover scraps of pastry and some orang marmalade.  The jam tart was good, but the smell of those pies was just killing me.  I had to wait until after both girls ate the tops of the pies and then abandoned them before I could steal a bite.

So that’s how you make two pies and one teeny-tiny jam tart from one apple and you better make sure you make that little jam tart because if you have two little girls, there’s no way in hell you will get a slice of pie.

Here’s some pictures of the pies:

The mini-pies before decoration.

The mini-pies after decoration.

The world’s smallest jam tart (shown larger than actual size).

Chef Cassie prepares to decorate the pies.

Sam offers her opinion (“Okay, I’ll eat it. No Mama, you can’t have any!”).