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Cherry Hand Pies

Cherry hand pies
Maya Visnyei
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(13)

Ingredients

Dough
  • 1 3/4 cups flour
  • 8 teaspoons sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup but­ter
  • 4-6 tablespoons ice cold water
  • 1 Egg
  • Coarse Sugar to sprin­kle on top
Filling
  • 2 cups pit­ted cher­ries
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 tablespoon flour
  • Pinch of salt

Preparation

Make your dough first at it will need time to chill before you roll it out. Place the flour, sugar and salt in a food proces­sor and give it a quick pulse to mix every­thing together. Add the cold but­ter and pulse again until the mix­ture looks like coarse sand. Now start adding the cold water — only 4 tablespoons to begin with and see how that goes — and keep puls­ing. It should come together in a ball in about a minute. Ad more water if you need to. I didn't. Scoop your ball of dough out of the food proces­sor and place on a work sur­face. Use your hands to shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it up in wax paper or cling film and chill it in the fridge for at least an hour.

You may have some thoughts about get­ting ahead and mak­ing your fill­ing in advance or even as soon as you place the dough in the fridge. I did and it was a big mis­take — the cher­ries released all of their juices and there was no way they were going to sit in politely in my lit­tle hearts of dough instead of spilling every­where. Okay?

Once your hour is up, you can take the dough out of the fridge and place it on the counter to warm up slightly. Now pre­heat the oven to 400 degrees. Line two bak­ing sheets with parch­ment paper.

Now get a bowl and toss together the cher­ries, sugar, flour and salt.

And roll out your dough quite thinly. The recipe called for 1/8th to 1/16th of an inch thick. How can you pos­si­bly tell?! Just roll it as thin as you can with­out it becom­ing trans­par­ent. Use a 3 or 4 inch heart cookie cut­ter to cut out the dough. Place half of the hearts on the parch­ment lined trays.

To the other half of your hearts you'll need to cut some vents. You can make a small criss cross or get clever like I did and cut out another lit­tle heart. This is a lot of trou­ble and bak­ing will oblit­er­ate all your efforts. I'm just saying.

Scoop about 2 teaspoons of cherry fill­ing into the mid­dle of each heart on the bak­ing tray. Work pie by pie as the fill­ing may start to spread and give you a hard time. Place another heart on top. Use a fork to crimp down the edges of each pie. Keep going until all the pies have tops. Now whisk and egg and splash of water together in a small bowl. Brush this egg was over the top of the pies. Then sprin­kle with your coarse sug­art. Place in the oven for 15 min­utes until the pas­try is golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly on the tray before remov­ing them to a cool­ing rack. Serve with love. Ahhhhh.