Anna's Recipes

Recipes for Food Things I Mentioned in Game

People asked! I have answered with this.

Experimental Pear & Sweet Cheese Pocket Pies

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Find an interesting TV show to watch/music to listen to, because this is going to take you at least two hours, possibly more, depending on how many pies you make/how fast you can make them. You'll probably be faster than I will, since I was experimenting, not following a recipe!

Ingredients:

Filling:

- Fruit:

8 small Anjou pears, diced, skin on

2 Tbsp salted butter

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

- Cheese:

4 oz cream cheese

1/3 c white granulated sugar

Crust:

- Fannie Farmer's "Basic Pastry" recipe for a 2-crust 9" pie, with slight modification.

2 1/2 c All-purpose flour

3/4 c Shortening (butter flavoured in my case)

1/2 tsp salt

8 Tbsp cold water

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp powdered cinnamon

Double all of those numbers! Pocket pies need a lot of crust.

Instructions:

Filling:

Dice pears. Melt butter on medium heat in a large frying pan with edges at least 2-3 inches high. If you aren't adept at the fine art of not accidentally tossing things over the edges of frying pans while wielding a spatula, err on the side of extra height!

Sautee pears in butter, uncovered, until they start releasing juice. Stir/mix them around with a spatula to keep them from sticking to the bottom. It took me about 4-5 minutes.

Because pears have pectin, they "goop" up nicely without you needing to add anything to thicken them. Turn the heat down a bit and let the pears continue releasing juice/softening. Once they are simmering in a puddle of pear juice and butter, add the nutmeg and vanilla, stir it around, and turn the heat all the way to low. It will take time to thicken, but because the heat's so low, you can more or less forget about it for the next 20-30 minutes. No need to stir it very often.

Turn the burner off when the juice has thickened/clings to the pears/spatula. Leave the uncovered pan on the stove to cool.

While the fruit is cooling, get out a mixer. You could do it by hand, but a paddle mixer makes life easier. Toss the cream cheese and white sugar in, mix, mix, mix, until it has become a smooth-glossy thoroughly mixed delicious creamy-sweet white goo. Took about a minute, for me, at speed 3 of 10.

Tuck a damp paper towel over the bowl to keep it moist. Time for the crust!

Crust:

In a large bowl, mix the flour, salt and cinnamon powder. I used a whisk because whisks are fantabular and make life easy.

Next, toss in your shortening. It helps if you chop it into smaller chunks before you toss it in, but it's certainly not necessary.

If you have a pastry cutter, use that. Otherwise you can use two knives to cut the shortening and mix it with the dry ingredients all Scissorhands style. Admittedly, I tend to end up using my hands anyway, which means I use nitrile gloves to avoid getting things stuck under my fingernails.

The goal here is NOT to turn the shortening into infinitesimal invisible pieces. You want them to be the size of baby peas. When you bake the pies, the bigger chunks o' shortening make crispy flaky spots in the crust. It's certainly not going to destroy the flavour or anything if you turn your shortening into sawdust-sized motes, but the crust will be less flakyriffic.

Once that's done, measure out your water in a small measuring cup, then mix the vanilla extract with the water.

Slowly add drizzly dribbly bits of water to the flour mixture, using a fork to shuffle it around and spread it. Do this bit by bit until your dough will stick to itself, but is NOT sticky to the touch. If it is soupy/sticky or feels like glue, there's too much water.

The original recipe calls for 6-7 Tbsp of cold water, but I ended up needing a few extra on top of that. My house was really dry, and the cinnamon added a bit to the dry ingredients.

Split the resulting giant blob of pie dough in half. Keep the unused half under a damp paper towel so it doesn't dry out. On a pastry board/VERY CLEAN table surface, dusted with flour, use a rolling pin to roll out the other half of the dough. Use gentle strokes until it is about 1/8" thin. Don't make it paper thin, but if you make it too thick, your pies will be all crust and very little fruit!

Construction:

I used a 3" circle cookie-cutter to make circles of crust. That size ended up making about 20 pocket pies, total (i.e. 40 circles). Whatever size you use, you'll need to adjust the amount of filling you put in to match it.

Get a cookie sheet. Cut parchment paper to cover it. You don't need to be exact.

Get a small cup of water.

Lay one side of the crust flat on the paper. By default, I used the drier/smaller/wonkier circles as the bottoms, since the tops need to stretch/look pretty. Use a paintbrush (or finger, if no brush is available!) to wet the edge of the circle. This will help the top stick to the bottom.

Scoop out a heaping teaspoon of the pear mixture into the middle of the circle. Scoop out half a teaspoon of sweet cheesy goop on top of it. If you are using a larger/smaller circle/other shape, you'll want to adjust the amount of filling you use accordingly.

Take a circle of dough and crook your index finger. Drape the dough over your finger, and more or less treat the knuckles like you're either juicing a lemon or making the world's tiniest pizza. The goal here is to stretch the middle of the circle UP, so when you place it over the filling, you don't smoosh the filling all over the edges you've just carefully water-painted to be clean and sticky.

Use a fork to smoosh/seal the edges of the top to the bottom.

If you are doing a bigger pocket pie, you will want to poke holes in the top for ventilation. I didn't bother with mine, since they were so small.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Let cool.

A bit of whipped cream on top only makes it taste better!