Ways To Use Up Leftover Pie Dough And Puff Pastry

There are several ways you can add cinnamon and sugar to your leftover pie crust and puff pastry to turn it into a delicious treat. Some are soft, while others are more crisp. Cinnamon rolls are a great treat to use up your leftover pastry. 

To make faux mini cinnamon rolls, spread out your leftover pastry dough, sprinkle it with plenty of cinnamon and sugar (and maybe even melted butter), roll it up into a cylinder, and cut it into rounds before baking between 350 and 400 F for 8 to 12 minutes. You can even frost them like regular cinnamon rolls when they're done. Doing the same thing with leftover pie crust turns the crust into something that's more like mini cinnamon roll cookies. They won't puff up like the other version, but they're still delicious and taste great with frosting. There's also a version of this treat that's a little more crisp. Simply sprinkle your leftover pie dough scraps with sugar and cinnamon, cut them into whatever shape you want, and bake them flat. All versions are delicious.

Pigs in a blanket and mini sausage rolls both make fun appetizers and satisfying breakfasts. Plus, they're a yummy way to use up puff pastry dough. There are several options for what you can stuff inside them, ranging from miniature little smokies sausages or hot dogs to link sausage or ground pork sausage. Some people add a layer of Dijon mustard inside, while others add cheese. Even though there's plenty of flavor in the sausage itself, you can go a step further by adding your favorite mix of herbs or seasonings like everything seasoning inside or outside the roll.

To make your pigs in a blanket or sausage rolls, add hot dogs or sausages down the middle of a pastry crust square, roll the dough around the pork, and press the seams together. If using a large square and lots of meat, cut the cylinder into bite-sized rounds. If you want to ensure that the sausage pigs in a blanket or sausage rolls have a nice, golden brown exterior, you can add an egg wash before baking at 400 F for 20 to 25 minutes.

When it comes to enclosed pies, you've got a range of options from sweet to savory. Seemingly every culture has a version of enclosed pies that are easy to transport and eat by hand without much mess. So, the sky is the limit on what you put inside your fried pies.

Some more familiar versions include enclosed hand pies with fruit fillings, Cornish pasties, Latin American empanadas, Italian calzones, and Indian samosas. While the original recipes sometimes call for a different type of crust, adapting the recipe to use leftover dough works just fine. Of course, what you add inside is up to you, depending on the flavors you're craving. You can even use hand pies as a vehicle to get more holiday leftovers into your mouth. After enclosing your sweet or savory filling in a square of dough, you'll need to crimp the edges so that nothing escapes. Then, you can either deep fry them in hot oil until the dough turns a lovely golden brown or bake them at 350 F for about 20 minutes.

If you only have a little bit of pie dough left over, you may not be able to make full-sized pies, but you can make mini pies. Even if you don't have mini pie tins, you can use a muffin pan to make them. For sweet pies like mini cherry pies or mini apple pies, you'll need to divide your normal pie filling between as many mini pies as you can make. It should only take 10 to 15 minutes to bake them at 400 F.

If you're more in the mood for a savory pie, you could turn them into something like mini chicken pot pies or vegetable pot pies. If you're serving them in a mini pie dish or other baking dish, you could put the crust on the top. Otherwise, you'll need to put the crust on the bottom to help contain the pie for cooking and eating. Of course, you can always make full-sized pot pies if you have more crust or if you want to make a lattice top.

Apple pie cookies are a fun treat that you can look forward to any time you have a bit of leftover pie dough or puff pastry dough. You can make them either with premade apple pie filling or a couple of apples from your fruit bowl. If you don't have premade filling, you can make some by cooking chopped apples with brown sugar, vanilla, a squeeze of lemon juice, and apple pie spice. If you don't have a jar of apple pie spice, you can make your own with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, and cardamom.

For the pie crust version, you'll place the apple pie filling between two circles of pie dough, and bake them at 400 F for 12 to 15 minutes. For the pastry dough version, you'll add the pie filling after baking. Cut pastry dough into circles and make a round indention in the middle before baking at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Then, push the indented area down to make a hollow to hold the pie filling.

Nutty pie crust cookies can be like a nuttier version of cinnamon pie crust cookies, and can even be made fancier if you add more ingredients to the filling. They're a great way to use up dough when you have a lot left over after baking. One simple topping you can use is chopped nuts (like pecans), cinnamon, and sugar. A fancier version includes brown sugar, eggs, shredded coconut, almond slivers, and melted butter.

One way to make these cookies is to place the topping on the crust, bake for 17 to 19 minutes at 350 F, top with a powdered sugar drizzle, and cut into squares. A great alternative is to roll out your dough, place the filling over the top of the dough, and then roll it into a cylinder to cut into small disks before baking at 400 F for 9 to 12 minutes.

While leftover puff pastry dough won't make a real pain au chocolat (chocolate croissant), it will make a passable version that won't require remotely as much work as the real thing. You're likely to love them just as much. Dark or semi-sweet chocolate is traditional for pain au chocolat, but you can use whatever chocolate you have on hand.

Pain au chocolat are incredibly easy to make. Simply cut your pastry dough into rectangles, place a piece of sweet chocolate or chocolate chips in the middle, fold to enclose, brush with an egg wash, and bake for 15 to 18 minutes at 400 F. After they're out of the oven, dust them with powdered sugar, and they're ready to enjoy. Alternatively, you can make them look more like croissants if you have enough dough to cut into long triangles. Place the chocolate toward the bottom of the triangle and roll it into a cylinder from the thick bottom to the pointy top before baking as usual.

The convenient thing about using leftover puff pastry dough to make palmiers is that they normally already start with a sheet of puff pastry dough. Even if you just have a single sheet or half a sheet of puff pastry left, you can still make these delicious cookies. They're best with pieces of crunchy demerara or turbinado sugar for optimum texture, but you can use granulated white sugar or brown sugar if those aren't available to you.

To make them, sprinkle the dough with sugar, mash the sugar into the dough, and fold the two outside edges of the dough to meet in the middle. Then sprinkle the top with sugar again and mash it into the dough before folding the dough in half in the same way you would close a book. You'll need to refrigerate the dough for half an hour before cutting it into rounds, sprinkling it with more sugar, and baking it at 425 F for 18 to 20 minutes.