Mini Pies!

One of my coworkers was recently promoted to assistant manager, so I asked him what he wanted me to bake for his promotion party. He said blueberry pie. I've never made that, but I'll try anything once. The party turned out to be on a Saturday night at a club, so I waited until Monday to bring the pie. I found a bunch of recipes for mini pies, but I decided on this one. I didn't want to deal with making the crust, filling AND topping ALL FROM SCRATCH.

I don't know why, but the first step is making the topping. Ok. This is the brown sugar, cinnamon and flour mixed together.

I don't have a pastry blender, but I'll probably get one because cutting up butter is very tedious. I'll be honest. I had to Google "how to cut in butter".

Ok, it's supposed to be crumbly, but it isn't. I suspect that cutting up the butter first wasn't such a good idea. Also, I didn't add nuts, and I probably mixed it too much.

Biscuit halves flattened to a 4-inch diameter. I used the top of a grits container to size them because it was the first 4-inch circle I found. The hard thing is getting them to stay stretched out. They started shrinking as soon as I put them in the muffin pan. These biscuits are Grands Homestyle. I know the recommendation was for the flaky kind, but the grocery store's inventory was kinda depleted.

Canned blueberry pie filling. From a can. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. This picture shows 2 tablespoons in each crust. That's actually too much because blueberry filling tends to bubble out.

Ok, this is definitely not pretty. The filling is oozing out and the topping doesn't cover the pie, BUT the taste was unaffected. I'll definitely be doing another batch of blueberry anyway.

This is my second attempt at topping. I took the butter straight from the fridge instead of letting it sit out and dropped the whole stick into the topping mixture. Then I used 2 knives to cut it up. Much better results and much faster!

This is my batch of apple pies. I used the spiced apple pie filling that was next to the blueberry pie filling in the baking aisle. The apples were sliced, so I had to cut them up into little cubes. I used 2 tablespoons of cubes. I wasn't worried about the filling spilling out because there wasn't much sauce.

Here's my second batch of blueberry. I only used 1.5 tablespoons of filling this time, but it still oozed out. I think it's ok because the topping is better in this batch.

Yeah, these are definitely a LOT prettier.

Here's my finished product. I took 16 blueberry and 16 apple to work with me. That should have been enough for everyone who wanted one to get one, but a bunch of people had two. Too bad I'm too lazy to carry more than two containers during my 75-minute commute. I'll consider bringing extras (of whatever I make) this Monday.