I made these delicious Apple Rose Mini Pies last weekend and am so thrilled with how they turned out. This was my first time dealing with pastry dough so I was nervous and also skeptical that I could get the beautiful rose shape, but its really easy. Read more to find out my lessons learned from  this pastry baking adventure!

When we went to Door County, I picked up a bunch of apples so I needed a recipe to use them up. I’ve been seeing these apple roses on Pinterest for a while and decide to give it a try. I used a recipe from Cooking With Manuela – but you could pretty much use any pastry recipe and combo of ingredients (pears, peaches) so long as the shape is right. I made some modifications to the recipe I found and here they are:

Ingredients

• Some sort of frozen pastry dough (there’s tons out there, but I used an instant one from my local grocery store that I just added water to).
• 4 red apples
• lemon juice
• flour to sprinkle on your baking surface
• 3 table spoons of raspberry jam (the official recipe calls for apricot, but I didn’t have that on hand)
• cinnamon
• powdered sugar

Make the dough per the instructions on the box and then put in the fridge to cool. While cooling – cut your apples into very thin slices and place into lemon water so they don’t turn brown. Once you have enough slices – you will need to heat them up in water so they get soft and bendable. When you roll them up in the pastry you don’t want the apples to snap – heating them will soften them up.

While the apples are heating, roll the dough into strips that are 2 x 9 inches long. I didn’t have a rolling pin on hand – but used a wine bottle, so if you realize midway you don’t have one don’t despair! Make sure you flour your rolling surface  well – or else your dough will stick. I learned this the hard way. Looking back I would also make sure that my dough is really thin – mine was a little to thick and when heated up it expanded a bit too much – so next time I will try to make these strips as thin as possible.

Once this is done you will heat up the jam with some water and then spread it over the pastry strips. If I do this again I would put even more jam then I originally did. I thought it would get too soggy  and be difficult to roll if I added too much, but after making these found a bit more jam couldn’t hurt.

Once all that’s done and your apples are “bendy” enough you just line them up on the pastry strip, sprinkle some cinnamon, fold up your strips, and then roll! It’s so easy! Once you finish one – it really does look like a rose, no artistic skills needed. I screamed out loud when I made the first one because it looked so pretty.

Place your apple roses mini pies into a very well buttered muffin pan and bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes! That’s it! Looking back I would also cover these rolls with tin foil to prevent the apples from getting to black on the top. I had to keep mine in until the dough cooked so the apples tips got a little dark.

Ted loved them and I’m so happy these worked out! They taste like mini apple pies, but look like roses. Perfect for early Autumn.