Apple pies! How Electric!

So I got this to play around with. It's an electric mini-pie maker!

When we bought the laptop, we got reward points on it, which ended up being enough for a hefty gift certificate. Hubby insisted I buy this pie maker. Apple pies to make from points from my Apple computer!

I was really excited so I decided to whip up some pies to see how it worked last night.

I had some apples left from the holidays along with some store bought pie crust. 

It asked to mix up sugar, brown sugar, but I added spices. It's just not apple pie without cinnamon, nutmeg, and some cloves! I use Penzey's spices, they are so good! The vanilla bottle in the picture is theirs and has a whole vanilla bean in it, which I save to make vanilla sugar once the bottle is empty.

There wasn't nearly enough dough with the store bought brand, so I had to mix up my own, I used the pastry pie dough recipe with the book, I've never made crust with vinegar and eggs before, so it was a treat to make it. You can see my pie cutter here, it's old school and I love it. Cuts the shortening so well!

You can also see the rolling pin behind the bowl there. That's my great-grandma's (I think) and I love it. Old fashioned wood rolling pin, it even has a slight lopsided side because it was hand made. 

The recipe called for me to make basically a carmel sauce to pour over the apples once the apples were put into the bottom part of the pies. I've made carmel a couple of times before, I really love the smell of it! With the brown sugar it had a really nice brown butter smell.

One of the things about electric made pies is the filling needs to be cooked before it's put into the machine, so I made sure to keep the sauce nice and hot so the apples would cook once the sauce was poured on them. 

Here's everything all ready! The darker pie crust circles are the ones I made, and I did make two pies with the store bought crust. You can't really tell from the picture, but the crusts I made really had a lot of crumble to them, which was very frustrating.

I have gotten some tips from my friends on G+ and they advised me to use a little more water and have the shortening at room temp next time. Hopefully I can make a good sugar pie crust! The crust really does need to taste good, it's a big part of the mini-pie.

This is the mini-pies baking. The two two are the store bought crusts, they brown nicely. The bottom two are my crusts, which didn't brown as much, but were still nicely golden. Next time I'll put an egg wash on them.

This was actually my second batch. I found you can really stuff the pies silly with the apples and pour a ton of the carmel sauce on top. The carmel stuck to the top of the pie machine just wiped off like a dream, I'm really happy with the non-stick surface. I like easy clean machines! 

And here's the finished pies! The first one fell apart terribly because the crust split when I put the apples in. It wasn't until after I made the pies that I watched a youtube on making them and found that you can use the pie crust cutter that comes with the machine to push the crusts into their bowls, which will make it a lot easier to make these later. 

They were super tasty! The apples were nicely cooked and the carmel was a good sweet. Next time I'll add more caramel to each pie, layer it with the apples more instead of just pouring it over the top.

All in all I'm really happy I got this. I'm going to try to make an egg pie next, I think. I like breakfast pies a whole bunch! I found a recipe that uses bacon in the crust, which sounds fabulous!