23 January 2016


It's time for this month's Improv Challenge.  The premise of the Improv Challenge is easy: each month there are two assigned ingredients.  The participants must make a recipe using both ingredients and blog about it.  

This month's ingredients were chocolate and pastry or bread dough.  I had a refrigerated pie crust leftover from Thanksgiving that had one more week left before its expiration date.  Perfect!  And with Valentine's Day quickly approaching, my mind immediately went to one of my favorite flavor combos: chocolate and raspberry.  Mmm.  I kept things super simple.  In fact, I made these while talking on the phone with my mom, and I am NOT a good multi-tasker!  So that tells you just how easy these are.

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Mini Hand Pies

Ingredients:
9" refrigerated pie crust (or homemade rolled out thinly)
Dark chocolate chips
Seedless raspberry jam
1 egg, beaten
Sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350.  Remove the pie crust from the fridge and let it sit at room temperature for 15 minutes.  Carefully unroll.  Using a cookie cutter or a glass tumbler, cut uniform shapes out of the dough.  Place a few chocolate chips and about a 1/2 tsp of raspberry jam in the center of half of the dough pieces.  Brush a bit of beaten egg around the edges.  Place another dough piece on top, lining up the edges.  Press down all along the edges to seal.  Cut a small slit in the center of the top piece.  Brush the tops with a little more egg and sprinkle with sugar.

Bake for about 24 minutes, or until dough is golden brown.  Remove and cool slightly before serving.

Makes about 6 mini pies.

 Here are the ingredients I used (minus the egg and sugar).  The chocolate chips were bigger than the usual. I used three in each pie, but if you are using regular chocolate chips, you might fit more in there.  


Look at that chocolate raspberry gooey goodness!  I only tried one bite, as I eat low carb and it was not my cheat day (I timed that horribly!), but it was heavenly.  My little sweethearts (my daughters) enjoyed the rest.

Please check out the other yummy chocolate and pastry creations below and come back next month to see what I make with tea and honey.