A is for Apple Pie

My youngest preschooler’s favorite dessert is apple pie.   Baking an apple pie was one of the A activities last week in our Activity-a-Day calendar.   This is a super easy pie crust recipe and adding a drizzle of carmel on top of the apple pie filling makes this a yummy tangy treat!   The kids had fun tying in the “Alphabet” into this activity with our nifty alphabet cookie cutters.   Thanks Laney for gifting a big bucket of cookie cutters to us!   We love them!   Are you doing anything with apples this fall?   Tell us about it in the comments!

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Super easy pressed crust recipe:

Do you have a rolling pin?   For awhile we didn’t.   I used a wine bottle as a makeshift rolling pin until I discovered this recipe!   It takes great and I love how easy it is to make this flaky crust.

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 cups of flour
• 2 tablespoons of sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1/2 cup of cooking oil
• 1/2 cup of milk

Mix all the dry ingredients together (sometimes I add a 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon or nutmeg to the dry ingredients), then add the wet.   Mix ingredients into a ball then flatten the crust with your palms.   Fold it upon itself and flatten again into a large circle.   Place inside your pie pan.   Cut the loose edges off and flatten those to make your top crust.   Fill with pie filling and bake as instructed.

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For the filling I chopped up half a dozen large granny smith apples, mixed them together with 1/4 cup of sugar (you might want more, this was a pretty tart filling), 1/4 a cup of flour and 1/2 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice mix (I was out of cinnamon).   We then drizzled carmel sauce on top of the filling before we baked it.

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Tips:   Press the pie filling in really tightly if you are using fresh fruit as it cooks down.   If you want to make a variety of different treats with the same crust and filling, check out the book, Bake, by Nick Malgieri from Kyle Books publisher.   Inspired by Nick, we used some leftover filling and added some chopped currants and cranberries   to make some pastries for our tea party.   Hopefully, a post about the apple pastries will be up by the end of the week!