PUMPKIN HAND PIES | Easy Hand-Held Pumpkin Pies Tutorial 🥧

Hi everybody! Welcome back to Marie's Kitchen. I'm so glad you're here. Today we are making pumpkin ham pies and these are, first of all, completely adorable. They're also so easy to make with just five ingredients in the filling and a store-bought crust. Anyone can throw these together. They're also so easy to serve and share. You can just set them out on the platter. Everybody can grab one. You don't have to, you know, cut a big pie and have forks and plates and all that. So keep this in mind if you're going to like a Friendsgiving or a potluck or a picnic. These are a great thing to bring in the fall. They are also delicious. You've got that warm pumpkin filling surrounded by this soft flaky crust dipped in a little whipped cream. Incredible! And finally, if you have family coming in town for Thanksgiving or friends coming over and you want something fun to do, you can make these ham pies. I'm going to show you two really fun ways to decorate them. It's so easy. You're not going to believe it but I can't wait to share it with you. Let's get started. All right, step one is to grease a 9-inch pie plate. I'm going to use a little butter here. You can use non-stick spray if you prefer. I'm just going to grease that pie plate here and then we'll set that aside. And I've got the oven preheating to 375 degrees. So we're going to start with the filling because the filling does need to be cooked and cooled before you can put it in the little pie crust. So let's do that first. We'll start with one cup pumpkin puree and I do really like the Libby's brand both for flavor and also consistency. Some pumpkins you'll get have a very, very watery consistency which can kind of throw off your filling. So stick with the Libby's or you can even drain some of the water off if you get another brand. Now what to do with the leftover filling? You can put it in the freezer and freeze it in a Ziploc bag and save it for next time you want to make these. You can make a double batch or you can hop over to my pumpkin bread and make a batch of that. So put this to good use. So we've got a large bowl here and we're just adding our pumpkin. Next step is two large eggs and I will put the conversions in the recipe and also on the screen. So if you're in a place that uses metric you can follow along as well. So two eggs. Next is one half cup half and half. And half and half I guess not everybody has half and half. It is just half milk and half heavy cream. So you can make your own. Just do a quarter cup heavy cream and a quarter cup milk. So we're going to add that in. Next is one half cup sugar. Then we'll do a little pinch of salt just to kind of round out the flavors. And finally some pumpkin pie spice. And if you want to do your own mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, whatever you like you can do that as well. I'm just going to use a teaspoon of the pumpkin pie spice to keep things simple. That was kind of a heaping teaspoon. No big deal. So we're just going to stir this up. I'm actually going to grab a whisk to do that. So we're just going to stir up the filling until it's combined. So easy right? Ah so low stress too. Sometimes making a pie can feel kind of stressful but not these hand pies. Really easy. All right that looks good. Now it's time to pour the filling into our pie plate here. Now we'll pop this in the oven at 375 degrees and let it cook for 20 to 25 minutes. It can still be a little bit jiggly in the center. It'll firm up as it cools. Now for the crust and I am using a store-bought crust here. These are from Trader Joe's if you happen to have a Trader Joe's in your area. I do really love these crusts. I think they're second to homemade. They have good flavor, good texture and fairly easy to work with. So the key for store-bought crust though is to get them out in advance. So get them out first like I did. Let them sit out and come to almost room temperature. You need them pretty soft in order to be able to roll them out. Now when you go to unroll these they always break. I have never not had one break. So don't freak out if that happens. Just bring it back together into a ball real quickly. You don't want to knead it a lot or anything but just bring it into a ball. We're going to roll it out ourselves. You always want to have a little flour nearby. We're going to put a sprinkle a little on our mat here and then I've got a rolling pen. A little flour on top and we're just roll this out. This is not going in a pie plate so we don't need it to be perfectly round. So you can really roll it in sort of a longer shape. That's fine. And if you've seen any of my pie crust videos you know that every time I roll I turn it once a quarter turn because that will ensure that it doesn't stick. I've taught a lot of pie crust making classes and the biggest problem we have is pie crust sticking to the counter and then it's you can't get it up and the only way to fix it is just to ball it up and start over. So if you turn though after each roll it'll prevent it from sticking or if it is sticking you'll know really quickly and you can add some flour underneath. So we're just going to roll this out. Oh and if you do want to make a homemade crust by all means please feel free. I've done both. You can hop over to my easy pie crust tutorial and there I show you how to make a homemade pie crust in all different ways. Kitchen aid stand mixer, food processor or in a bowl with your hands. Okay this looks good. I have it fairly thin because when you fold it over with the filling inside you do get double crust so you don't want to have a really thick crust there. Now with your crust you should be able to get about four or five five inch pies. You can make these smaller if you have a lot of people to feed and just want little bite-sized pies or you can make them bigger. And although I do have some cutters that I'm going to use today, in the past I've used just anything you can use. This is a lid you can use that to cut it out. Just find something about four or five inches in diameter and use that as your cookie cutter. I'll go ahead and do some of these smaller ones here. Maybe a big one over here there. I'm going to set these aside and then what we're going to do with our scraps here since we have all these extras we are going to make some decorations that we're going to add to the outside later. So what I'm using they're called cutter stampers. They are cookie cutters but then they have a stamp on top where you can press down and it adds a little design. And this is a leaf, one of my favorites. And so you press it down to cut the cookie shape out and then you stamp it to get the little veins of the leaf on there. So cute. We're going to save these to use to decorate. You can find these cutter stampers at many different places. I have them from Williams-Sonoma is great. You can get them on Amazon. Just search up cookie or pie crust cutter stamper is what they're called. You should be able to find them. They have leaves and acorns. Really cute for fall. Pumpkins, turkeys, all kinds of stuff. So have fun with that. I have an assortment as you can probably imagine. So we'll cut out some of these leaves. I have a little smaller one here. Cut out those. And this is super fun for kids to do if you have them around. I love it too. For me it's just so relaxing. Okay so I think we've got just about all we can out of this crust. So we can bring it back together and maybe make one more out of it. You don't want to work the dough a whole lot because if you do it's going to want to stretch back and it's going to get kind of tough. So working as little as possible. Make it back into a little disk here and we'll roll that out. I guess we'll make one more here. And then a few more leaves. Get this a little thinner. You want the decorations to be pretty thin as well because otherwise you're going to have this big thick leaf on there. So roll that out pretty thin for the cutouts. I'm going to put the cutouts on a plate. And these can go in the freezer. They're actually easier to work with when they're cold. So pop them in the refrigerator or freezer. They can also be done ahead. This is a great make ahead if you want to cut out your pie crusts and cut out your decorations. You can have it all ready to go. Have the filling ready to go. Do that ahead. You can keep it in the refrigerator the night before or you can even freeze it and then thaw it when you're ready to use it. So lots of good options when it gets around the holidays and everything feels really stressful. Okay it sounds like the filling is ready so we're going to grab that out of the oven. Looks great. We have our pumpkin pie filling done. It's a little bit jiggly in the center but it'll firm up as it cools. So we'll set this aside and you do want to let it cool completely before you put it into the little pie crust. Okay and if you don't want to do a pumpkin filling for this I do have an apple filling. Equally as easy and delicious. So if you'd rather that for a filling hop over there and check that out. It's on my channel and on my website mariesaba.com. While we're waiting for the filling to cool and again that is a great thing to do ahead so you could just move along and not have to wait like we are. But while that's cooling I want to show you a really really fun way to decorate these pies. So I have these little cutouts here that we did with our cutter stampers and they've been in the refrigerator so they're nice and cool and what you can do is either you can simply put a little egg wash on these and they will come out nice and golden. But if you want to get really creative grab some food coloring and food safe or clean little paint brushes and we are going to paint them like fall leaves. So I've got a little bit of yellow here and I've been doing this for years always painting my little leaves in different ways on different pies for Christmas for Thanksgiving and it is just so much fun. The kids really love to do it. It's relaxing and of course it always comes out just really beautiful and you can get all natural food colorings. I think Watkins is the brand that sells it so if you're worried about not using you know artificial coloring look for a natural brand and then if you like you can add a little bit of water. You really don't need much because I do like the brighter colors but yesterday I did one and my daughter said that's too bright mom. It's too bright so I'm going to water it down a little bit this time. Anyway and then you just paint your leaf with your brush here like this. Super simple. Now if the leaves are really warm they will be harder to paint so that's why you do want to chill them before you paint them. This just makes me want fall. It's so fun. We don't really get changing leaves in Texas so I am completely obsessed with all the different colors of leaves. Ours change a little bit but it's just not as as beautiful as I see in like the Northeast. So this is how I get my my leaf my fall leaf fix. So I'm doing kind of orange and red and just mixing them all together. Okay so these are done. I'll set them aside in the refrigerator again and then we'll be ready to use them when it's time to decorate. Okay I think our filling is cool enough to use. I am going to set it on this ice pack to keep it cooling but it's cool enough. Okay so I have our crust set out here and what we're going to do is make a little egg wash and that's just an egg mixed up with maybe a couple of teaspoons of water to thin it. And if you don't want to use an egg wash you can use a heavy cream. Works just as well. Not quite as shiny and golden but I've used either. So we have our egg wash here and now what we'll do is scoop out a little bit of our filling. You don't want to overfill these because then it's going to be too hard to close and the filling is going to leak out while it's cooking. So just a little bit and then you want to set it a little off-center and then you can use either some water or a little bit of the egg wash around the edge here. You'll want to put something there to serve as kind of a glue so when you seal it it stays together. And then I just press it down with my fingers and then I've got a fork here and what we're going to do to really seal it nice and tight is press down with a fork and that adds both a little decoration and it also helps to make sure it stays shut. There you go. We've got our first little ham pie. Now we'll do another one here. A little more filling in the bigger ones. And you know my husband doesn't even like pumpkin pie. He says it's calls it squash pie and like why would he want to eat a pie with a vegetable? What are you going to do? I love pumpkin pie but he doesn't even like it and he loved these ham pies. We had them the other day and he said the pumpkin's really subtle. It's really really good and we have a nice tasting crust and just a kind of a mild spiced filling in the center. It's really good even for people who don't really like pumpkin pie. What's so interesting about these little ham pies as I call them is that I feel like almost every culture has their own version. You can call these empanadas. Empanadas de calabaza. And then there's I know there's these are very common in I think it was Australia and New Zealand. I've had lots of people telling me oh we call them this oh we call them that. So let me know in the comments what you call these where you live. I would love to hear all the different names for this concept of pastry with a filling. Okay we've got one more here. Now at this stage you can freeze them. You can wrap them in saran wrap. Put them in a ziploc bag. Put them in the freezer until you're ready to use them. So that's another great make-ahead thing. If you want to make the pies and just let people decorate them that's another option. Okay so now the fun part. We're going to decorate our pies here. So we've got our hand pie and then what we're going to do is take a little bit of our egg wash and I'm just going to brush that on in a pretty thin layer and again you can use heavy cream for this if you like or you can just leave them plain. I've done all three of those options depending on what you're in the mood for what you got time for and then to glue on our little decoration I'm going to put a little egg wash on the back of that and then just place that right on kind of glue it on there like that and that's done. The main thing to know is that you really want to paint your leaves before you put them on the pie. It can get a little messy if you try to paint the leaf while it's on the pie. So do your egg wash then use the egg wash to add your painted leaf and then we'll set this on a baking sheet. I am going to show you how to make these in the oven as well as an air fryer. Either way works and they're both quick and easy. Let's decorate a few more. First our egg wash. If you want to do a plain decoration you'll just same thing just without painting it you'll just put a little egg wash on the back to glue it on and then you can also do some egg wash on the top to make it nice and golden. I've had so many requests for different fillings too to put in here. Several people asked for banana which I didn't even know was a thing but I guess like a banana cream filling would be really good or like a chocolate cream filling. Several people asked for apricot and I actually could not find any apricots at the grocery store right now so otherwise I was going to try that filling but I'm loving all your ideas and all your comments. So I think my favorite way to cook these is the air fryer. It's just so easy but if you don't have one don't worry you can pop them in the oven. So first thing we'll put some in the air fryer. I'm just gonna open the basket here and we'll pop in two of these pies. I guess we'll take these two probably two of the same size so they're going to cook at the same amount. If you have if you're cooking the smaller ones I usually do those about maybe eight minutes the bigger ones 10 to 12 minutes. So we'll set the air fryer to 375 degrees and the timer for about 10 minutes and then we'll check it. All air fryers are a little bit different so set it for maybe eight minutes 10 minutes and then give it a peek and see how brown they are. Temperature to 350 and then time to let's do 10 minutes and start. Now we'll put these two in the oven. I've got it preheated to 400 degrees and we're going to bake them for about 15 to 20 minutes. Now while those are cooking we're going to make some whipped cream to go with it. You can't have a pumpkin pie without whipped cream so we'll do about a cup of heavy whipping cream and then a tablespoon or two of sugar depending how sweet you like it. Maybe a little vanilla for extra flavor just a little drop. There we go. Okay sounds like the air fryer's done. Oh my gosh they are beautiful. So golden and with a little bit of color on the leaves is so pretty. Look at those. Now we'll grab our others out of the oven and these look beautiful as well. Look how pretty. Okay the hand pies are done. We've got them cooling here on a drying rack and they just look so gorgeous. Makes me so excited for fall and so I really hope you get to try these. If you do let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you. Also if you like this video be sure to hit the thumbs up button. It means so much to us and also to YouTube. That's how they decide who else sees this video and if my channel is worth watching. So take a minute hit that thumbs up button. It really does mean a lot. For this recipe and more head over to my website marieseva.com. There you can go and print out this recipe and all my recipes. Put them in a notebook and make your very own Marie's Kitchen cookbook for free. My goal is to give you some really easy recipes that turn out great every time so you can build some confidence in the kitchen and feel really inspired to share good food with people that you love. From my kitchen to yours. Thank you. Okay now I get to try one of these. Kind of hot. Maybe a lot of whipped cream. Oh it's melting and it's so warm. Oh my gosh. These are delicious. I can't wait for you to try them. The filling is so wonderful and that light flaky crust. Delicious.