Baking Experiment: Caramel Apple Hand Pies

I’ve wanted to try making hand pies (aka mini pies) for a while now, so decided to make them this month’s pie experiment. I’ve also been playing around with a caramel apple pie recipe for years, and thought it might make a good filling for my hand pies.

I didn’t use one specific recipe, but read through a bunch of them and sort of amalgamated my own. I cut up 3 apples into small dice (I tried for around 1/4 inch cubes, but nothing about my dicing is exact) and cooked them in a pan with 1/3 cup of granulated sugar and maybe a tsp or so of an apple pie spice mix. The apples I used were Honeycrisp, because they are DH’s favorite so we had some around. Anyway, I cooked the apples until they were somewhat softened and a lot of the liquid was cooked off, then let them cool. I also cut up some caramels and mixed them in for the caramel component

Then I got my pie crust ready. Here is where I made a slight tactical error. I wanted to use some hand pie molds I got a while ago:

Cute, right? According to the box copy, you will “Add a touch of woodland whimsy to any meal with delightful handpies that look like charming owls and foxes. Intricate designs allow steam to escape while baking for crisp, delicious results every time.” So I cut out the pie shapes, filled and pressed them, and baked at 375 F for around 25 minutes.

Well. I think possibly I rolled my crust out too thin, because here is what I got:

Gah! They look more like charming woodland orc pies, but oh well. They did taste good