PRODUCT REVIEW: WILTON’S MINI PIE MOLD

When we are traveling in southern Oklahoma my husband and I always make an effort to stop by the Fried Pie place there just off the highway near Davis, OK.  We are seriously hooked on these pies.  It is a good thing for our waistline that it is a 3-4 hour drive from home or we’d be eating them on a regular basis.

Thanks to a posting by my friend Anthea our waistlines are in jeopardy again.  She mentioned she had a couple of mini pie molds and posted some recipes for pocket pies.  UH OH!

Immediately my mind flew to all the possibilities not only for dessert pies like those little pies from McDonalds (only better) to homemade hot pockets of all types. 

After cruising utube to find tutorials on the use of the pie molds I decided they were definitely in our future.  I put one in my “to buy later” part of my ongoing amazon.com order and then waited until I needed some little something to put us up over the $35 limit to get free shipping.   I knew it wouldn’t take long to get to that spot because we shop amazon on a regular basis.  I was right.

I managed to hold off for a while after we received the Wilton Mini Pie Mold to actually use it.  This weekend was when I finally gave in and decided to give it a whirl.

Since we decided to make cherry pies instead of our weekend sweet rolls for breakfast I set ready made pie crust out the night before to come to room temperature.  This was my first mistake.  We found that slightly cool pie crust actually worked better as we tried our first run of the pies.  

While ready made are handy all three of us agreed my homemade pie crust would have been much better than the ones I had gotten for near free with a coupon and on sale. 

Whether you use the ready made or homemade is up to you.  Either way the crust needs to be about 1/8 inch thick.  Any thinner and you may have leakage problems on your pies.

Using the mold itself is easy.  You use the bottom of the mold to cut out your rectangle (the shape I was using) by placing that side down on your rolled out pie crust and pressing firmly on all edges.  Then you peel up the dough and place it in the opposite side of the mold.  

A few NOTES here:

1.     Work with your dough on a floured surface so that some of the flour clings to the dough or spray the mold with cooking spray because if you don’t the dough tends to cling to the mold.

2.     The cut out shape is just slightly too small for a good seal on the two halves of the dough if you don’t tease it up over the lip some.  One video I watched suggested instead of cutting using the bottom to make a slighter larger pattern of wax paper and cut the dough using that either way works.

3.     If you discover your piece is a little too small you can “patch” the edges of the dough with scraps of the dough. 

No matter your method you put the dough in the mold and in the bottom half you place approximately two tablespoons of your filling.  We were using homemade cherry pie filling  but the options are endless.  Jellies, jams, pie fillings, pudding, chocolate sauce, meats, veggies, cheeses etc. The main thing is to not put too much liquid in. 

I found that with my recipe for a nine inch pie’s worth of cherry pie filling I could make three 9” pie crusts worth of pocket pies using this mold.  I did so by cutting it out using the base twice and then re-rolling the scraps to form other sheets to cut from.  That made nine pocket pies with a few pie crust scraps left for cooking with a little cinnamon sugar on them as a treat.

Once you have your filling in the bottom half of the mold you brush the edges of both halves with an egg wash made of one beaten egg and a tablespoon of water. 

Next you close the mold and press.  Instant seal, and if your dough is not too thin it won’t leak when baking.  It does take a bit of practice to figure out the exact combo, but the final pies of our experiment were perfect.  

You can either then bake them or fry them.  We chose baking because of the possible leakage of the first few.  Plus the few calories it would save.

I brushed the top of each pie with the egg wash, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and pierced each one with a fork about 3 times to let steam out as it baked.  400 degrees for about 16 minutes and they were wonderful.

So the only negative I have to say about the mold is the cutting out area could be just slightly bigger to make sealing more concise, but other than that we love the Wilton Mini Pie Mold and give it an A- for overall convenience and ease of use.  

Jan who is thinking hand held pot pies made from leftovers for lunches in OK