Mini Bacon Apple Pies

Ingredients:
-6 strips of bacon
-1 can apple pie filling or equivalent in homemade
-2 pie crusts (homemade or store bought, whatever you typically use)
-Brown sugar

I only use John Morrell bacon.  It is freakishly tasty.  Fry up your strips to a tender crispy stage (aka there are crispy pieces here and there but the entire strip isn't crispy nor turning to dust).  Drain on a paper towel.

Prepare your pie dough as needed, roll out, and cut 2 inch circles out (biscuit sized basically).  Press GENTLY into a mini cupcake pan (24 wells).

Cut up the apples if needed in your pie filling to suit the smaller pies.  For the bacon, you have a couple of choices.  I just cut the bacon into pieces that were about the same size as the top of the pie.  If you are making this mostly for guys who will shove the whole thing in their mouth at once, this is perfectly fine.  But for girls who might take more dainty bites, you might want to cut the bacon up into pieces so that it gets in every bite. 

Top each with a little brown sugar.

Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes or until done.  Some pie dough recipes have a lot more butter than others and they brown differently, so a lot depends on what you like to use.  This particular one we used called for 1 1/4 C flour and a half stick of butter, whereas others called for a lot more butter. 

I ended up baking these right around 30 minutes, of which the last 5 I cranked the heat up to 375F to try to get the dough to brown a little more.  That helped get my bacon nice and toasty on the edges, which was just what I was looking for, so consider upping the heat near the end.

If you prefer, you could bake these higher for shorter (some similar recipes do 400 for 15 minutes).  I am a low and slow type, and I could not be happier with how these turned out.

Happy crafting!