food to glow

Easy Cherry and Cream Cheese Ruffle Hand Pies – make with a simple cherry sauce nestled with (vegan) cream cheese in rosettes of crunchy phyllo pastry. A healthy-ish sweet treat for dessert.

This recipe could not be easier. I urge you to try this with the last of this year’s cherries, or with incoming season’s bursting-sweet plums or juicy apples. It’s a heavenly marriage of crispy phyllo, lemony-vanilla vegan (or not) cream cheese, and your own homemade – and super easy – homemade cherry pie filling.

I’ve loosely modelled the look and feel of this easy dessert recipe on various ruffle pies I’ve seen when researching how to make hand pies with a difference. I liked the unmade bed look of this style of baking. The ruffle pie seems to have its origins in Greece, where a sweetened milk and egg mixture is poured over artfully crumpled folds of phyllo pastry and baked to a gorgeous pudding texture. This truly sounds delicious and I plan on making one of these rich Greek custard pies someday soon – and posting the results over on my Instagram.

For now, with an eye to highlighting fruit not phyllo, I wanted to capture the last of this year’s English cherries in little hand pies. Not ones where we labour over making homemade pastry. Or even rolling out and faffing with the bought stuff. I thought it might be fun to grab one of the various packets of phyllo that I seem to collect and fill strips with a batch of homemade cherry pie filling – first used to serve with my recently published Probiotic Pancakes. I also wanted to hark back to the “Danish pastries” (no Dane would lay claim to these 1970s US ones, I’m quite sure) I grew up enjoying, ones with lemony-vanilla cream cheese topped with a dod of over-sweetened, commercial fruit goop. I always loved the cream cheese bit best, of course.

How to make phyllo hand pies

You may use this technique – and indeed improve upon it as I haven’t seen it done this way elsewhere – with fruit or vegetables. I plan on a savoury one in the near future.

My fine motor skills are not what they once were so, no doubt your efforts will be much neater and photogenic. If you make this please do share a snap with me on Instagram (tagging @food_to_glow) or Facebook. I’d love that! Maybe I will get some presentation tips from you. 🙂

So, for each hand pie, take a length of phyllo cut it in half widthways and fold one piece in half lengthways so that you have a long double layer; run a knife through the fold to split it. Take your cream cheese filling and spread some along the middle length, topped with the thick cherry sauce (see image). Fold one side into the middle and fold it back onto itself, like you are making a paper fan (see image).

Do the other side. Now gently coil it to make a ruffled crown shape, tucking in the end so that it doesn’t stick out and unravel.

That’s pretty much it! Depending on the size of your pan you can make anywhere from three (like I did) to over a dozen. I also have shown one in a small skillet (below) to show that you can make individual ones. With this recipe you don’t need any support from a pan, so you can do these little phyllo hand pies on a baking sheet, in a dish or in a skillet.

Other phyllo hand pie filling ideas

Roasted vegetables and goat’s cheese

Baked squash with fried mushrooms, cream cheese & za’atar

Cooked down apples, rhubarb or quince

Fresh blueberries (no need to break them down in a sauce) and honey ricotta with nutmeg

Vegetarian shepherd’s pie with mash on the bottom

Broccoli, brown rice and blue cheese

Roasted peaches and raspberries with pine nuts nuts

Let your imagination go wild!

Other Food To Glow recipes using phyllo pastry

Broccoli, Spinach & Wild Rice Phyllo Pie

Beetroot Tops and Courgette Phyllo Tartlets

Spinach and Feta Pie

Swiss Chard, Goat’s Cheese & Walnut Strudel with Tomato Fondue

Porcini Mushroom Stroganoff Strudels

Garlicky Chard and Potato Phyllo Pie

Wild Mushrooms and Green Pie (above image)

Have fun experimenting with this basic phyllo pastry idea. There are just so many ways to go with this – sweet, savoury; fancy, simple; healthy, not-so healthy. Let me know what you do to make this recipe your own. 🙂

 

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RIPE FOR PINNING!