Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr 15 min
Ease: 6
Taste: 7
Leftover Value: 10
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer!
Recipe: Flat Apple Pie
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hour (does not include time to make pie crust)
Ease: 4
Taste: 5
Leftover Value: 2
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain!
Recipe: Cinnamon Rolls
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 2 hrs 30 min
Ease: 10
Taste: 10
Leftover Value: 10
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer!
The following three recipes were made along with about ten other recipes for my Thanksgiving breakfast. If you're just reading this blog for the first time, you may require an explanation for why our breakfast is comprised of dessert items. This post or this post should help to explain the madness.
Scones baffle me. Anytime I make them they seem that they will be a complete flop and yet in the end somehow wind up coming together beautifully.
Between cutting up the dough for the scones and rolling out dough for four different pies, my arms certainly got a workout!
The dough of scones is supposed to be stirred until "just combined".
Boy, do I hate that description. What exactly does 'just combined' mean? And where is the logic in stirring until 'just combined' when the next step is going to direct me to dump this mass out onto my cutting board only to combine it completely.
Thank goodness I had my favorite helper with me so that I didn't meditate on such nonsense for too long.
Watch and you'll see what I mean about the craziness that is scone. The bowl of 'just combined' ingredients when dumped on the table couldn't look less combined.
This is the point where I cringe and begin to convince myself that I will be dumping my scone dough into the trash.
Then magically, this happens:
and suddenly all is right with the world.
I do realize that it has something to do with the chunks of cold butter that are cut into the dough. Perhaps what I have difficulty understanding is how anyone ever decided to make a pastry this way.
Not that I'm really complaining.
Because scones are awesome.
One complaint, which I realized as I pressed the dough to size, was that the scones were going to be monster huge. I didn't want to stray away from the recipe's directions, so even though it would have been better for my breakfast to have them at half the size, I cut them into the eight pieces as PW instructs.*
*I did, however, break them up into quarters after Thanksgiving breakfast.
You can't tell from the picture, but these puppies are as big as my hand.
A scone is no good without icing, at least that's my theory. Here is where the maple part comes in. The icing is made or powdered sugar, whole milk, butter, a splash of coffee, a dash of salt, and a little maple extract.*
*I couldn't find maple extract anywhere so I used maple syrup--same thing, right?
It seemed like too much icing at first, but then I came to my senses and realized that you can never have too much icing.
It worked out nicely that three of the recipes I needed to make for my recipe challenge would fit perfectly with my Thanksgiving breakfast.
Pioneer Woman's Flat Apple Pie is such a great idea, but in the end, I'm not so sure it works.
At least for those of us who bake our pies the day ahead.
I used the same crust that I made for PW's chicken pot pie. This made life pretty easy because I could just grab the crusts out of the freezer, let them thaw for 20 minutes, and then use them.
Although I wasn't in love with the final product of this recipe, I was in love with this:
The apple filling mixture was so delicious that my helpers and I could have eaten the entire bowl and skipped the whole pie part. I equate it to caramel apples, just without all the stickiness.
Again, I think this is such a fantastic idea. It makes life easy, and each pie requires only one pie crust.
We did run into an issue when I realized that I only had one cookie tray left to bake on (because, naturally we were baking other things at the same time).
So four spatulas were used to lift the pie and place it in a pie pan so that the second flat apple pie could be made on top of the cookie tray.*
*Note: The recipe makes two apple pies. This is important because if you only want one and you peel and slice five apples, you will probably be upset. Peeling and slicing apples is no joke. Unless of course you own one of those fancy shmancy apple peeler/corers. Then I'm sure life is awesome for you.
Here is where the problem occurred. Though the apple mixture was delicious, it was also messy. With both pies I made, the mixture oozed out of the crust and onto the pan. This made cutting and scooping the pie quite difficult, especially for the pie that we saved to eat on Thanksgiving morning.*
*The pie baked on the cookie tray basically crumbled apart when I tried to move it from the tray. This was partially due to the stickiness of the insides that had spilled out onto the tray and partially due to the flaky crust.
I've saved the very best for last. These cinnamon rolls are out of this world--but they are incredibly hard work. My sister-in-law usually comes over to make these with me and we have it down to a science.
I've already blogged about these before so if you'd like to read about the process go here.
Or, just stare and drool at the below picture.
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