Pumpkin Pie Bites

Hey everybody!!! I'm baaaaaaaacckkkkkkk!!! Thank you all for your patience as I have been studying my brains out trying to get my blasted degree finished. I'm not quite done yet but as of tomorrow I have exactly one month left!!!!!! I can hardly believe it!!! There are already so many exclamation points in this post!!!! There may be a few more busy moments for me as I get things wrapped up but I'm so close to the end and figured, well what the heck, let's get back to the fun things in life. Which of course, include blogging. So for my first post back, I'm going to share a recipe I made at Thanksgiving (yes, that's how behind I am so I'm sure you can all understand how excited I am to be almost done with my degree!! The first one that is ;) okay, where were we...)

Pumpkin pie bites. The perfect holiday treat. They're excellent for those gatherings where you're all just standing around and eating all evening (which is pretty much how all of our Thanksgiving/Christmas gatherings go). They're super easy, super cute, and super delicious. The conclusion you can draw from that last sentence is that these are going to be your new favorite as I used the word "super" three times in a row. Enough said.

Ingredients:

2 refrigerated, ready to roll pie crusts (I used Pillsbury)
8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature (one block)
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (or cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves and ginger mixed together. Here's how to make your own pumpkin pie spice.)

Tools:

3.5-4 inch cookie cutter (or round cup. Which is what I used. If you can believe it, I don't own a cookie cutter).
Mini-muffin tin
Rolling pin

First start by pre-heating your oven to 350 degrees Celsius. Then take the dough out of the wrapper and take a rolling pin and roll out even more (the dough doesn't need to be thick and you can get more pumpkin pie bites this way). Once the dough is rolled out, start cutting out your circles.

Keep balling up your leftover dough and rolling it out again until you really can't get another circle out of it. As you go along, place the dough rounds into a greased mini-muffin pan. I did 12 at a time, alternating cups so the dough wouldn't overlap. Like so...

Once you've cut out all of your little pie crusts, whisk up one egg and apply a little bit of egg wash to the tops of the crust. Now you can start making the filling.
Mix the cream cheese, sugar, canned pumpkin,  two eggs, vanilla and pumpkin pie spice together until combined. When I made this I had a little trouble getting my cream cheese mixed in smooth, so the next time I make it I think I will mix the cream cheese and eggs together first, then add the rest of the ingredients. Someone try it out and let me know how it works.
Spoon a little bit of the mixture into each of the crusts, almost to the top, but not quite. The filling will puff up a little bit so you don't want to fill the crusts right to the top before baking.
Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until crust edges are golden brown. Take the little pies out of the pan and set them on a wire rack to cool. Repeat for remaining pie crust rounds.

Aren't those just straight up adorable?
Top with whip cream and/or chocolate shavings to finish them off.

Until next time....

xoxo

-A (So good to be back!!!)