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Sunday, May 9, 2010

A reason to have left over pastry dough

It seems to be impossible to make exactly the right amount of pastry, no matter what size pie pans I use, so it's always necessary to use that extra dough.  When I was a kid my mother would roll out the leftovers, cut it in to strips then bake it with a dusting of sugar.  We called these "pie crust cookies".  After I got married my husband took over the dough, making what his mother called "rail road tunnels".  This entails spreading the dough with softened butter and cinnamon sugar, then rolling it up in a tube and slicing it up like cinnamon rolls before baking.  Both of these make great little treats for the kids while they wait for the actual pie to be ready.  Two of my daughters recently spent a weekend together and made pie, and they invented a new pie crust cookie.  I made their new cookie out of the extra dough when I made pie today - it's a combination of each of their grandmothers' tasty treats.  After rolling out the pastry I spread it with softened butter, then I cut it up into squares (my daughters used a biscuit cutter to make round cookies but I didn't want to have to handle the dough any more or have any waste) and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  These lasted about 30 seconds after coming out of the oven.

1 comment:

cara lou said...

Ooo yum!! I'm always tempted to make a pie crust just to make railroad tunnels. But I know I'll eat them all single-mouthedly. Which would be awesome and disasterous all at once.