Kids Cuisine

The next time you bake a pie or quiche, don’t throw away those scraps of pie crust dough. Reroll the leftover dough scraps and use them to make these amazingly simple and addictive Cinnamon Pastry Flats. Of course, if you’d rather skip the pie and go straight to the flats, feel free! I like to use the following dough recipe (Never Fail Pie Dough), which comes from Alison Boteler’s The Great American Bake Sale.

This recipe is a great no-pressure way for kids to learn pastry dough techniques like rolling out dough and using a pastry wheel. These taste and look much more refined than their ingredients and construction would suggest!

Cinnamon Pastry Flats

For Never Fail Pie Dough: 

3 cups all-purpose flour (I use unbleached)
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups shortening
1 egg
1 tablespoon white vinegar
5 tablespoons ice water
1 tablespoon butter, melted
2 tablespoons cinnamon sugar

Combine flour and salt and cut in shortening until the mixture forms crumbs. In a small bowl, beat egg, vinegar, and ice water together with a fork. Pour the egg mixture over the flour mixture and stir with a fork until the dough comes together.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Roll dough out on well-floured surface to a thickness of about 1/8 inch. Cut dough into even strips about 1-inch wide and 4 inches long with a pastry wheel. Place strips on ungreased baking sheet.

Brush strips with melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. If desired, flute edges. Bake at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes or until pastry is golden brown. Let cool on wire rack and store in an airtight container.

Pictures by Me.