Another Experiment With a Tiny Casserole Dish

 Recently, I indulged myself in a kitchen experiment utilizing one of those little glass baking dishes I'd bought at Goodwill back in 2024.  For a while, I'd been toying with the idea of trying to make a small deep dish pie.  Because, while DH and I both love pie, we really don't need to eat an entire 9" pie between the two of us in the few days that a pie stays good.  If I could make a little pie in my little casserole dish that would enable us to still enjoy a pie now and then without overeating it (because it would be sacrilege to let a pie go bad). 

Finally I decided what the heck, I might as well go for it.  The great thing about kitchen experiments that involve desserts is that unless you burn them to a crisp, even the flops are usually still edible.

By my calculations if I halved my single pie crust recipe for a 9" pie, that should probably be enough dough to fit my little glass dish.

Pie crust:

2 Tbsp +2 tsp lard (shortening)

1/2 cup flour

pinch of salt

1 1/2 Tbsp cold water

Cut lard into the flour and salt until crumbly.  Stir in water until moistened.

Roll into an 8" circle on a lightly floured surface.

I gently eased the rolled out pie crust dough into the little dish, making sure it went all the way to the bottom, then trimmed it to about 1" more than the dish's opening.  After folding the excess under and fluting the edge, I poked the dough with a fork before baking at 475 degrees for about 10 minutes until lightly browned.

As you can see, the crust shrank during baking.  Next time I won't worry about trimming the excess; I'll try to leave more on the edge if I can get it to not flop down the outside of the dish.  Hopefully that way, even with shrinkage it will stay above the rim.

Once the crust had cooled to room temperature, I took a box of instant chocolate pudding from the pantry, and mixed it with 1 3/4 cup milk for about 2 minutes.  Then I poured roughly a cup (maybe a cup and a quarter?) of the pudding into the cooled pie shell--almost to the top of the crust--and put it in the fridge to set and chill.  

The leftover pudding was a nice snack for the baker during kitchen clean up 😊

At dessert time, I whipped up a little bit of heavy cream with about 1/2 tsp of sugar, cut the pie in half, and served it with a big dollop of whipped cream.

YUM!  Next time, I might try a tiny fruit pie; that will be more challenging to see if I can figure out how to adapt the cooking time so that the fruit filling (probably apples) is neither crunchy and underdone nor cooked to mush.  My current theory is that the cooking time won't be very much different than a regular sized pie, since the casserole dish is just as deep, or maybe a tad deeper than, a pie plate, so even though the diameter is smaller the thickness of the filling is about the same.