Now that everyone is home, we tend to feel hungry more often and end up cooking multiple times a day 🙂 So, thought I will share easy to make recipes.. one per day! Baking as a family is LOTS of fun, and comes with a BIG Bonus “Messy Kitchen” 🙂 Be prepared for the post-cooking clean up time 🙂

Let us look at the ingredients

Ingredients	Quantity
Pie crust ***	2
Apples (Green preferred, if not red)	3
Brown granulated sugar (You can use white granulated sugar instead as well)	1/3 cup
Cinnamon ground	2 tsp
Lemon (medium size)	1/2
Chopped pecans or walnuts	1/4 cup
Salt	1 tsp
Powdered sugar (for dusting on the pies)	3 tsp
Butter	1/2 stick

*** Pie crust – Those who do not have a pie crust or want to make one at home, use 1 stick of refrigerated butter chopped into small bits and mix it with 2 cups of all purpose flour, adding water as appropriate to make it into a dough. Split it into 2 balls and roll the dough and wrap it and keep it in the refrigerator for 4-6 hours to cool. Then, take it out and roll each of the pieces into a pie crust.

1. Dice the apples into small pieces (as we are making mini-apple pies (For a big pie, you can slice it thin)
2. In a bowl, mix the diced apples, sugar, salt, cinnamon powder and the lemon juice and set it aside for about 15 mins
3. Roll the first pie crust and cut it into mini circles that can fit into the muffin pans.
4. Roll the second pie crust into thin strips to layer on top of the pies
5. Grease the muffin pan with butter or oil
6. Place the mini circles of dough in the muffin pans and ensure the size is big enough to have the sides covered
7. Bake it in the oven at 350o for 5 minutes and take it out
8. Now, fill two-thirds of the cups with the apple mixture from Step 2.
9. Layer the thin trips of the pie crust from Step 4 to cover the individual pies
10. Melt the butter and brush the tops of the pies before putting it in the oven
11. Bake it at 350o for 25-30 minutes and take it out. Let it cool
12. Dust powdered sugar on top of it and serve

PS: Variations we have tried and liked

1. You can dust it with powdered sugar, chocolate syrup, maple syrup
2. Instead of apples, use pears
3. Include golden raisins or cranberries
4. Instead of thin strips, use a fully layer of pie crust (traditional)
5. Instead of brushing it with butter, brush it with egg whites

Hope you like it as much as we do 🙂