I have nothing but respect for the makers and bakers of hand pie. Truly. Respect. I have only attempted hand-pies a few times because my previous experiences with them were a mess. And baking messes, when I have them, result in waves of cursing in the kitchen, which my poor partner patiently endures and then waits the appropriate, oh, ten minutes or so, before gently asking if he can help. This is also the reason why slab pie has been banned from our home — at least for a few more months.
Given the history of hand pies in our kitchen, including one batch that was accidentally made with gluten-free flour, I have a bit of a complex about them now. I start out with a fear that it’s going to be a trial baking them, and then my hands feel giant and unequipped to deal with pint-size pies, so I usually give the whole process a few minutes of thought before deciding to make a standard-size pie for the masses.
Ok. All that said. I received an incredibly generous tool months ago from Bee Loomis, intended for dumplings, I think? Or empanadas? But knowing my love for pie she recognized the potential that it would work equally well for hand-held pie. As a side note, Bee is secretly a master of pie, but she sweetly and modestly won’t fess up to it in person. I was, however, lucky enough to taste one of her cherry pies last fall in Kansas.
Never being one to quiver in the face of a challenge for long, and because I’m also feeling ready to dive whole-heartedly into pie-practice again — it’s stone fruit season and SUMMER in the bay area — I decided to give peanut butter-cherry hand pies a whirl, and, you guys, breathe easy, they taste amazing.
Ready to be folded and crimped in one easy motion!
They don’t look amazing . . . yet. This is part of pie practice. They look like, I dunno, sad, sad empanadas. But the process was transformed thanks to my new tool and pretty darn pleasant. So there’s only room for the finished product to improve.
If imperfect pie happens to you, too, I invite you to subscribe to my pie theory, which is — imperfection is actually the guise of perfection. Even if a pie doesn’t look super, if you haven’t overworked your dough and the filling is not wrong (like the bourbon-pumpkin pie I made one Thanksgiving that was inexplicably terrible), it will ALWAYS taste amazing. Ok, nine times out of ten. Even if the crust cracks or the filling overflows the pie shell, serve it to your friends, your family, and I bet they’ll be happy. And when it’s sliced up and on a plate, no one will know the difference.
This is a warm and nostalgia-inducing take on the classic PB&J sandwich, in pie form. Peanut butter-cherry hand pies would also be delicious by swapping out the cherries for your favorite jam or jelly.
Pie dough:
Your favorite recipe for a double-crust pie, or, my favorite:
2 ½ cups all-purpose or pastry flour, plus extra for dusting
1 tbsp. Granulated sugar
1 tsp. Kosher or table salt
2 sticks unsalted butter
½ cup ice water
Filling:
1 cup all-natural peanut butter — creamy or nutty, your choice
1 ½ cups fresh cherries, halved and tossed with 1-2 tbs. sugar
Notes:
— An egg wash around the edges of each circle of dough helps the pies seal together when assembling. For the egg wash, I used 1 egg mixed with 1 tbsp. cold water.
— If you’re using jam instead of a fresh fruit filling, ¾ cup to 1 cup of jam should be plenty.
Bake at 375˚F on parchment-lined baking sheets for 15-20 minutes, or until golden brown.
May: that glorious month in the Bay Area — the first burst of summer bringing sunshine, blossoms, stone fruit, and a thousand ideas of what to bake, preserve, and just plain gobble with peaches, and cherries, and strawberries at every turn. California is pressing forth in the wake of a drought and very little rain the last two years, so we’ll feel the scarcity of summer fruits later this season, I’d wager, and are already witnessing the price increases per pound of these beauties. In the meantime, your May Short List (in June), posthaste. 
1. The season’s first cherries. And a quiet Saturday evening sitting on the stoop with my partner, sharing ginger beer and lager and spitting cherry pits across the driveway into a garden bed. The simplicity of it and our easy happiness all spelled L-O-V-E. 
2. Homemade churros! Nick’s sister had the ingenious idea to bring these to a work party, and it was the first time I’ve ever deep fried anything in my kitchen. Amazingly, it was simple! Dan used a pastry bag to pipe dough into the pan of oil, and before long we had piles of 
3. Fresh strawberry ice cream. And, um, overflowing the ice cream maker and being forced to eat the overfill right away…which, really wasn’t the problem I thought it would be. I added both lemon and lime to my blend of heavy cream and milk and sugar before adding it to the ice cream maker, and it created a very bright flavor. 
4. Several rounds of Adventure Bread. A delicious, dense, gluten-free loaf from Josey Baker Bread, it’s packed with seeds and nuts, all toasted to lend a beautiful earthy flavor. This bread is reminiscent of the European-style loaf from Trader Joe’s, except it’s 1000x yummier. So far, we’ve used almonds, sunflower, sesame, and pumpkin seeds, and I expect each incarnation of this loaf to become even more experimental. 
Town Bakes 