I’ve noticed a trend going around lately of having small, personal desserts. Gone are the days of a piece of cake, everyone wants their own miniature dessert. We no longer have just the cake for dessert, we have dessert stations with individual miniature trifles, pies, cakes and cookies.

I love this trend. I think that it makes a dessert station look much more personal, it gives more options, and every dessert has a homemade feel to it. You can’t get these miniature desserts from a supplier that has a giant freezer, these are made in-house.

I recently added a great item to our dessert menu: strawberry-rhubarb pie-in-a-jar. I think they are so cute! My objective was to have a miniature pie that had great taste, but looked hand-crafted. In the end, it came down to buying small jam jars (125ml ones), making a great pie filling that is cooked in advance and figuring out how to lattice the crust so that it looked like more than a piece of dough sitting on a jam jar.

So cute!

The key to the lattice top is to roll out the dough and cut it into long strips. Then overlap them so that they are woven. Then I used a round, crinkled cookie cutter that matched the diameter of the pie jar and cut out circles of latticed dough. I lifted the dough off of the table with a spatula and placed it on the pie jar.

The best part, the pies only have to bake for 15 minutes because the filling is already cooked through. You just need the dough to get a little flaky and crispy and it’s done!

Served with our blueberry-lemon trifle (we wait to add whip cream till right before the event starts. Otherwise it melts!)

Tags: dessert, personal, pie