- Today we're making ginger peach hand pies.

Look at these darling little rosettes on top.

If you wanna know how to make 'em, come on and join me.

Let's get started.

(gentle guitar music) The first step in making our ginger peach hand pies is to make the dough.

And under full confession here, I'm going to tell you that this started out as a galette.

I was gonna make a ginger peach galette one day, but just didn't work out for me quite as well.

So I actually kind of reformulated this dough and made it more sturdy so that it fits nicely into a little cup like you're gonna see us make in a little bit, but first, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's make the dough.

So in here I have 1 2/3 cups of all-purpose flour with 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt.

So I'm gonna just put that in the bowl there.

And then to that I am adding 1/3 cup ginger sugar.

Here it is again.

I know you guys, if you've watched some other videos, you've seen me use this over and over again, but honestly it is my go-to flavor.

And with a ginger peach hand pie, what could be better?

So 1/3 of a cup of our ginger sugar goes into the mix.

Whisk that all around.

And next, we're going to add our butter.

So what we have here is 14.

Yes.

14 tablespoons of butter.

I'm using the European butter just because I think it really tastes flavorful in any sort of pastry crest, but again, if you have regular butter, that's fine too, and it's unsalted.

So in it goes.

I cut it up into small pieces as I possibly could, because as with any pastry, you know, we really don't wanna work it a whole lot.

So the smaller we can get our little pieces, you can even grate butter at times, which is great for then making sure that your butter gets incorporated relatively quickly.

So, okay.

Let's start working on it.

Let's just get, I'm breaking up my pieces here because what's the point of cutting them up in small pieces if they're all reclumped together?

So, okay.

I'm breaking them all up.

And now you can use your hands.

You can use a pastry cutter.

And I do have a pastry cutter here.

So let's do the first few with the pastry cutter, and then I get going then with my hands as well.

So I try to start to break up these butter pieces into pea-sized shape butter.

And just a little funny story, I guess.

I mean, for the longest time when people would say, oh, your flour mixture with butter needs to look pea-sized.

I thought everything needed to look pea-sized.

So I was just a little confused and granted.

I made a lot of tough pastry because I just kept working it and working it and working it, and it never did even look like peas at the end.

There was always this extra flour that was kind of in the bowl.

Anyway, silly story about me.

Here we go.

And the way you use this pastry cutter too, is just keep moving your bowl and just try to place your cutter in different places while you're moving your bowl around.

And you don't have to worry about being Uber gentle because when the butter is really cold, it's really kind of tricky to get it all nicely incorporated and pea-shaped.

So I'm gonna stop here with the pastry cutter and I'm gonna be really gentle with myself here as I try and get the rest of this butter into the bowl, because sometimes these pastry cutters have teeth and a little bit of blood in your pastry is never a good thing.

So, all right, here we go.

And now I'm just gonna use my hands.

I'm gonna finish this off by just trying to feel for the butter pieces that are a little bit larger than pea-shaped.

And I'm just smashing them.

And just get down underneath there and just keep working it and working it.

The European butter will melt or get soft a little bit quicker than our regular American butter.

So try to be as quick as possible while you're doing this.

All right, so here we have, this is pretty much pea-size.

And to this now, we are going to add four tablespoons or 1/4 of a cup of cold water.

Plus I added one teaspoon of vinegar.

Now, in my mixture here, I had some peach vinegar.

So if you have any sort of flavored vinegars, that's pretty awesome in the dough, but if you don't, that's fine.

Just use plain vinegar.

And what the vinegar does actually is helps to make your dough pretty flaky.

It's really a great add-in.

And I see that I have some ginger sugar left in my bowl.

Let's get that in.

I don't wanna miss any of that.

So having put the vinegar mixture in our bowl, now we grab our spatula and we're just going to incorporate that vinegar in.

You're not gonna get it so that it's totally together in this step, but we do want to mix it up as much as we can and get all of the flour mixture together with the butter, with the vinegar.

And so you can see, it's starting to clump together here.

And so now I'm just gonna take my hands at this point and I'm gonna try and knead it just gently a few times in the bowl.

Once we get it together and get it kneaded, then we're going to dump it out on our board and we're going to roll it out.

It's a really cool process, how we're gonna roll this dough out and I'm excited to show you that.

So here we go.

It's looking pretty good at this point.

And next, we're gonna put it onto a board or our silicone mat, and we're gonna work it just a little bit more before we put it in the fridge to rest.

(gentle guitar music continues) So we have our dough fairly well incorporated in the bowl, but now we wanna just kind of dump it out onto our board or our mat, whatever you're using or your counter.

Get all of that goodness out of there.

And we're going to start to roll it.

We wanted first to come together a little bit more so, so I'm just pressing it together, making sure we're incorporating all of the little flour bits, all of the little stray pieces of butter that are in the dough, because we don't wanna lose any of that goodness.

So I'm going to put a little bit of flour here on my mat and put a little bit of flour here on the top.

And we're going to start our rolling process.

Now we're going to roll this similar to that of puff pastry, where we're going to roll it, fold it, turn it, roll it, fold it, turn it.

And we're gonna do that three times.

I just think this is so cool because it kind of reminds me of making puff pastry without all of the headaches and hassles of making puff pastry.

So for me, it's the best of our worlds.

So okay, we're gonna roll this out.

And as you see, it's coming together nicely.

We wanna roll it to about a nine by 12 inch rectangle.

Doesn't have to be exact, because we're gonna fold it anyway, but we just want to get the dough evenly spaced out.

You can see here that, okay, it's not a perfect rectangle obviously, but that's okay because now we're going to fold it.

So the way we fold it is kind of like an envelope.

We take the front third in and fold it over.

We take the lower third in and fold that over.

And then we're going to turn it like this and we're gonna roll it out this way again.

We need a little more flour on the board.

A little more flour here on top and away we go.

We're gonna roll.

And again, we're going to roll it to about a nine by 12 rectangle.

And as you can see, look at how beautifully this dough is coming together.

I just love a good dough.

And now I need it to go a little bit wider, so I'm just gonna gently roll it this way, roll it the opposite way.

Because I think I'm long enough here.

I'm about the 12 inches in length.

And then we're going to fold it again.

And if we were doing puff pastry, what this folding process does is it just gives the dough that layer and layer and layer of butter, a dough, it makes it flaky.

And although we're not doing that sort of buttery layering with the dough, this still makes it a delicious dough, and I think rather unique for just, you know, what you would normally think of with a pie pastry, or even our hand pie.

So here, this is our third roll.

Again, once again, out to our nine by 12.

Don't worry if some of it's getting a little sticky.

That's all right, because we're gonna put this in the refrigerator to let it rest after we kind of roll it out.

Now, you know, depending on the size of what your end role is, whether it's a circle, whether it's gonna be squares, semicircles, whatever it is.

I mean, you can try to roll the dough out to that shape now, but, you know, we're gonna be rolling it out once again so I'm not worried that I'm gonna make little boring circles out of our finished dough versus, you know, now worrying about getting it maybe round or rectangular.

So here we go.

Our last fold.

Fold 1/3 in, 1/3 up, and turn it.

And then we are going to put it in our plastic wrap because this little baby then is gonna take a nap for a couple hours, at least.

It can go and stay in the refrigerator longer.

It can stay overnight, it can stay a day even, or two if you wanna make it ahead.

You can actually make this dough up and freeze it where it'll stay good in your freezer wrapped well for a couple of months.

But here we have it.

We're gonna put it in the fridge and we're gonna come back in a couple hours when it's ready.

Our dough has been resting for two hours in the refrigerator, so now it's time for us to roll it out.

What we're going to be doing for our ginger peach hand pies are little four inch rounds that we're going to be putting into muffin tins, but first, let's get our dough rolled out.

I'm not worried that it's square shape and that I'm actually going to be cutting rounds.

It'll all work its lovely magic out.

We are going to roll this out to 1/8 inch.

And as you can see, you know, a little tip that I learned was if you can see the dough roll about an inch longer than what you're currently at, then, you know, all is good and you still need to keep going, right?

When your dough stops expanding, then you really probably have worked it as much as you need to work it.

So here we go.

I'm continuing to roll.

What I wanna do is make sure that I can lift it.

So let me go under here.

And even though this is a lovely silicone mat, the dough can sometimes get a little sticky.

So let me put a little more flour underneath and continue to roll out.

We're almost there.

We're getting there, guys.

But see, can you see that roll, how that expands out?

It's just a cool little visual to make sure that you're not working your dough too much.

The other thing too is I have a rolling pin that actually has a 1/8 inch indent.

So I know that I'm never going to roll it out so that it's too thin in certain places and too thick in other places.

So all right, I think we are good here.

Just gonna give it one last roll out here.

And now with my four inch cutter, this one has, it has a straight edge, has a scalloped edge.

I'm gonna use the scalloped edge because you'll see it gives you a nice little edge in your muffin tin.

And we're just gonna start, just pushing directly down and cutting out our rounds.

Get as many rounds out as you can, and then you can re-roll this one more time, and then do this all over again.

So here, let's see, I think I can squeeze one more in this cutting.

And then the dough is just so flexible and lovely that it just comes away here.

And I'm just gonna put this to the side for now.

I'm gonna re-roll it and get some more rounds, but for right now, I wanna take these and I wanna show you how I've put these in the muffin pan before we actually fill and get these little babies into the oven.

So here I have already prepared a muffin tin, and I've sprayed it really, really well with cooking spray, because there's nothing worse than baking something that smells wonderful, looks wonderful and you can't get it out of your pan.

And the other thing that I've done is I've just cut little strips of parchment.

So what I'm doing, because these parchment little strips will help us to then once the pies are baked, it's nice and easy, we can just lift it up with the little strips.

So it won't get the strips to stay, but let's take one of our roundsettes, real easy.

We're just going to take one and we're going to gently press it into the muffin tin, and just gently shape it around.

It goes in really nice and easy.

I think you can see here that it just fits very well into the tin.

And you can see the little scalloped edge, which I think looks so cool when it comes out and is baked.

Let's do one more.

Here's another piece of parchment.

And it's okay if it's not perfectly in the muffin liner.

You can always lift it back out gently and kind of reposition it if you think that, you know, you've got more dough on one side or the other.

But there you have it.

Well, I think I have room for one more.

Let me show you one more.

Three's a charm.

And we're just gonna put again, our little strip that we cut out into our muffin tin, and we place the dough gently into the tin.

And now we're gonna put these in the freezer so that they can firm up.

No need to dock them, no need to blind bake these.

We're going to get them a little bit more firm in the freezer, and then we're gonna fill 'em and get them ready for baking.

So now we're going to make our peach filling.

And what we have here is about six or seven peaches that I have sliced up.

Actually, these were frozen and I've defrosted them, and they're lovely and tasty.

Next, we're going to add 2/3 cup of granulated sugar to our mixture here.

We're adding two tablespoons of ginger, and that will give it a delicious gingery flavor.

This is fresh ginger that has been peeled and minced.

To this, we are adding one tablespoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice.

And then, so that it holds all together, we're adding 1/4 a cup of corn starch.

I like to use corn starch just to keep my fillings together a little bit better.

I know some people like flour, some people might use tapioca flour, so you can certainly be flexible with what you have on hand.

So now let's just give this a nice little stir before we put it in our pot to do its magic.

And I just really wanna get all of those ingredients evenly distributed through our peaches before we put it in the pan.

I know it doesn't look very good at this point, but man, oh man, does this filling taste delicious?

The little hint of ginger in there, the sweetness of the peaches.

Okay.

Well, there we go.

That is looking good.

So now let's pull over our pan, and I'm just gonna pour the mixture in and get all of our sugar and our corn starch and juices, and peaches and everything in.

Oh, now I'm just gonna take a second to clear the decks here and turn on our burner.

So actually, as we are making this, we are going to stir and stir.

We don't wanna burn anything again.

But as the mixture warms, that's when then we'll and we'll put in our butter.

Once it starts to get warm and thicken up, and we can see that everything is melting, the sugar's melting, we're getting our corn starch nicely cooked.

And for this to really jam up so that it makes a nice, solid filling versus anything that's gonna like fall out of our pie shell.

We really need to get that corn starch to the point where it's boiling.

But you have to be careful because when it does that, it can burn really, really easily.

So we're just gonna continue to stir and stir.

And this will eventually thicken up.

It'll take probably around 25 to 30 minutes for it to fully get nice and jamming.

So here you can see our mixture is starting to warm up.

We want the corn starch to get baked out of here or cooked out, and it will lose some of that cloudiness, which is really what we're looking for here.

But as it's warming up, as it's cooking, again, be careful because it will burn easily.

And now it's warm enough here that I'm gonna put my butter in and we'll let that get all nice and melty in our mixture, but we're going to continue to cook it down because we want to make sure that our peach ginger is jammy with chunks of fruit, but yet not so runny that it's gonna run out of our pie tart.

So after about a half an hour, this is what your finished product looks like.

You can see nice chunks of peaches, you can see that it's nice and jammy.

I'll stir it up here for you.

Look at how beautiful those peaches look.

It's the perfect consistency to put in our little mini peach hand pies.

So now we need to slice our peaches because remember, to get that lovely little rosette pattern, we need to slice them very thinly so that we can form them around.

And once you do that so that it's nice and thin, it's a really easy thing to make a rosette design.

What I am using today are already prepared peaches in terms of the skin is removed.

I've got them from this jar of peaches, which is just, they're absolutely very tasty and wonderful.

And the thing that's nice versus these canned or jarred peaches to use versus fresh peaches for, you know, this design, is they're already pretty malleable.

So really, all we need to do here is if we slice them thin enough, then you know, we should be really golden in terms of having slices that we can bend and we can shape.

And now these peaches still have the pit in them, and so all I'm doing is making very, very thin slices.

And there I hit my peach pit.

So now I'm gonna turn it to the other side, and I'm gonna do the same where I'm slicing very thinly, as thinly as possible.

You kind of want a little bit of this variation where some maybe are a little thicker, some are a little thinner.

That's all good because you can choose the thicker ones for the outer edges, and then the thinner ones go inside.

And you'll see to make that little perfect rosette center, we really need a thin slice.

Here we have this end here.

And so just kind of slice the whole piece away from the pit.

Same on the other side.

I'm just turning it over and giving it a little cut.

And then you know what?

I save the pit and the peach that's remaining on the pit for me.

A little treat for the baker.

I think that's only fair.

But now, these little end pieces, you have to be careful because it's slippery since they've been in the jar and they're syruped, but you wanna try and just make them as thin as you can.

And same with the other side there.

Now, some of these slices are circles.

Well, we don't really want them to be circles.

So simple thing, we're just cutting them in half and then we're adding them to our bowl with the rest of the peaches.

So here I'm just slicing in half, putting them in.

And once I get all of them in, I'm going to mix them with our other peaches.

And what you will see here is I've added just a little bit of corn starch to the peaches that are in our bowl, only because when these are baking, they'll get juicy and I want something to be able to kind of catch or gel up some of those juices.

So as you can see, they're a little bit of white.

That's just a little bit of corn starch that I added just to hopefully gel some of the peach juice that will come when we actually bake these up.

So there you have it.

We're gonna put this aside, and next, we need to get ready to fill our peach pies.

So now we get to what I think is the fun part.

We're going to fill our little mini peach pies, and then we're going to make that lovely little rosette design there.

So the first thing we're going to start with is we take our filling, and I am putting, this is a tablespoon scoop.

So I'm putting one tablespoon in each of our little pie tarts.

The pie shells, I should say.

And although it's tempting to really fill them up, try not to, because what's gonna happen is it's just all gonna kind of bake out and make a big mess.

But even though it is delicious, I know it can be hard to sometimes not do it.

So remember, we just sliced up these peaches.

Now we're going to pick the ones that we liked the best, and we're going to start our rosette designs.

So what I look for in my outer edges, which is where I start, I try to look for a really medium kind of thin.

You want it so that it can stand up against the crust, as well as then kind of be wedged into the filling.

If it's too thin for the outer edge, it's just gonna collapse on you.

So all you do is you kind of find those perfect slices and you just go in concentric circles.

You overlap each one of the peach slices, and you begin to build your rosette.

And yes, you can see, I kind of, if I pick one up and I'm like, no, I don't like that one.

I just put it right back in the bowl.

And again, clean hands are a baker's best tool, because I don't know how you would do this honestly with any type of utensil.

We really have to get in there, get our hands nice and sticky, but yummy, and just start to form your rosette.

And now, as you get to the center, it starts to get a little trickier because you're having to really mold that peach slice to a smaller area.

And so try to pick smaller slices, maybe on the thinner side, and that will help you to continue to build your rosette.

And then for that very center piece, you really want one of the thinnest ones you can find.

Almost, you know, you're like, oh, that is so flimsy, but you need that to be able just to roll it in your fingers and then put it right there perfectly in the center.

So now let's go ahead and finish up our other two.

The same process.

We're gonna take our little thicker outer edges and form our rosette outer shell and bring it all into the middle.

So honestly, this is not difficult at all.

It is a little time consuming, but goodness gracious, the finished product is just so pretty and so dazzling, that for this little extra time and effort, just think how you can impress your friends, family, or yourself for that matter.

I mean, I just love when I pull these out of the oven, I think they just look so beautiful, as they will kind of rise up.

It's almost like they're blooming when they're in the oven, which is also why I like to put just a little bit of corn starch in the peach slices so that, you know, as they're rising, they kind of have enough of sensation to form that gel, that goo in the center to keep everything from just coming right out of the rosette.

And now here's my center piece for that one.

And just know that, Hey, if you pick one that doesn't quite fit right, or it's not to your liking, you can always pick it up, put it back in the bowl and choose another piece.

So these are really pretty forgiving when you think about it as pretty as they are.

And so now we're just gonna finish up our last one.

And even if you use like a little bit thinner one, you can always reinforce with a little bit of a fatter wine alongside of it.

You're kind of pushing it down into the filling so that it gives it something to kind of anchor itself on.

But honestly, I could just lose myself doing this.

It's kind of almost meditative for me.

It's just so rewarding when you see your finished product.

So, all right, I just am gonna put a couple more right here into this one.

And sometimes, you know, pieces will kind of push up on you, so just gently push everything back down so it stays in place.

And now I'm looking for the perfect center.

Sometimes it can be a little tricky to find just the right one, but here's a nice one.

And this is another trick too.

So this one's a thick one, but what I'm gonna do for this center is just basically break it apart in my hand and just kind of make it almost more of a stamen like center versus a round circular center.

And there, see.

We have lovely rosettes, each one a little bit different just as they would be in nature, which I think is pretty cool.

Now, before we put these in the oven, I do wanna sprinkle just a little bit more, and this is ginger sugar that if you guys have been watching some of the other videos, I love this ginger sugar.

So I'm just sprinkling a little bit on each top of our little mini peach pies.

And this will melt.

I mean, you won't see the actual sugar once you pull them out, but it gives it a nice little extra hint of ginger and just a little bit of crispness on some of the edges.

All right, so now we're ready.

We're going to put these in a 350 degree preheated oven.

We're going to let them cook for probably about a half an hour, 35 minutes.

After about 15 minutes though, I like to open up and flip them around so that, you know, the front end is now facing the back end so they can get evenly baked, and we'll come back when these guys are ready to come out of the oven.

So these have been in the oven for around 35 minutes or so.

They've been out now for probably 15 to let them cool off enough so that I can handle them.

And sometimes they kind of stick a little bit if some of the juice has bubbled over.

So always have just a little knife handy.

You might have to just gently nudge around the little pie itself, but they pretty much easily pull out with our little strips and they are ready to then put on display wherever you would like, or however you would like to display them.

I think this one here might give me a little trouble.

So I'm just going to give it a little knife action and edge it out gently.

These little strips really make the world of difference in terms of getting these out all in one piece.

And the dough itself is just so nice and firm.

Yeah, you're gonna see it's pretty flaky and tender, that it's the perfect match-up for these little mini peach hand pies with rosettes.

So here we have one more that I can get on here.

And now I'm just gonna get rid of these strips and get rid of this pan, because I can't wait to taste and to show you the inside of these.

So here, let's pick a pretty one.

I think this guy.

They're all pretty, but let's look at that one.

And here, I'm just going to cut it in half and show you.

Look at how nicely that dough holds up.

And you can see the filling in the center with the peach around it.

Oh my gosh, so sorry, guys, but I can't wait to just bite into them.

And by the way, if we were on the best British baking show, we could turn it over, we could see, and look, no soggy bottoms.

So let's give it a taste.

Oh my gosh.

The peaches, the peach filling, the ginger, this wonderful crust with a little bit of ginger in it, it is fabulous.

I really, really hope that you try this recipe and enjoy it for years to come.

(gentle guitar music)