Apple Pielets

These little hand pies look so adorable in the picture in Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi.  And it is a perfect time to bake them because apples are readily available in a great many varieties.  As part of my participation with the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers, my goal is to bake and post every other Tuesday.  I did bake them on Tuesday (yesterday), but here it is already Wednesday and I am only now beginning to write about it.

Let me say that there are only 3 pie-lets left of the dozen.  And we didn't even eat them for dessert at dinner--it's just that every time someone passed by the kitchen, it was impossible not to grab a pie-let.

The dough was easy, although a little fussy to cut out since I was using make-shift cutters.  I left out the raisins because I wanted to leave them out.  I used two different apples:  Northern Spy, my absolute apple pie apple, and Cortland.  I'm sure to make these again!

Tiger Cakes

One of the very first Dorie Greenspan recipes that I baked was one I found years ago in a magazine.  It was Chocolate Glazed Walnut Tea Cakes.  They were little cakes made with ground walnuts and cinnamon and unbeaten egg whites and baked in muffin tins.  They were topped with a lovely chocolate ganache.  Sound familiar?

Dorie's Chocolate Glazed Walnut Tea Cakes

When I first looked through Baking Chez Moi and saw the recipe for Tiger Cakes I realized that they were a wonderful variation on the Walnut Tea Cakes.  I made them some months ago and was delighted by the flavor but extremely frustrated when these tasty little goodies stuck to the muffin tins.  I made them again the very next day and generously buttered one tin and generously sprayed another.  This time, they came out fairly easily, although I had to run a blade around each cake while it was in the tin.

So yesterday when I was getting ready to bake these cakes I was well aware of the potential sticky problem.  I checked the P&Q on the TWD site and saw a great recommendation from Nancy T. to put a little bit of plain batter in the bottom of the pan.  I decided to do this in addition to spraying the tins thoroughly.

Here's the result:

Most of the Tiger Cakes stuck!

Most of them stuck really badly.  There were only three that came out unscathed after I ran a thin, sharp blade around the edges.  These three were on one side of the tin and I know that my oven heats unevenly.  So maybe these three were a little better baked.  

I decided not to make the chocolate glaze this time because nothing could pretty-up the cakes that fell apart as I removed them from the pan.  I must say, however, that they are very tasty--my husband says "addictive" and he has already eaten half of them.  

I do plan to bake these again but am thinking I may need to invest in a silicone mini-muffin pan.

I'm really looking forward to the experiences of other TWD bakers.  Check out their blogs here.v