Bake an Apple Pie from Scratch as if it came out of a box with this delicious fall apple pie recipe + hacks + pie decorating mastery.
Easy AF Apple Pie
Equipment
- Pillsbury Premade Refrigerated Pie Crusts, 2 Count – Walmart.com
- Marketside Peeled Sliced Apples, 12.5 oz, 5 Count – Walmart.com
Ingredients
- 1 package Refrigerated Pie Crust 2 crusts. Room Temperature.
- 24-28 oz of Peeled Snack Apples aim for 6 to 7 cups of peeled apples
- 1/4 cup Brown Sugar
- 1/2 cup Sugar
- 2 TBSP Flour
- 1 tsp Cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp Nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp grated lemon peel
- 1-2 tsp lemon juice
- 1 TBSP Butter or Margarine
- A little extra brown sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425°
- In a medium to large bowl, mix apples, sugar, brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon peel, and lemon juice together.
- Unroll one of the pie crusts. Be careful unrolling. If it's too cold, it will break up, especially as you get to the end of the roll. If the pie crust breaks up, allow a few minutes at room temp for it to adjust, and then try some more. Do your best to unroll it, and then in the broken areas, pinch it together and then rub it smooth. Flip it, repinch and rub smooth.
- Place in pie pan. Sprinkle bottom with a thin layer of brown sugar.
- Dump the apple mixture into the pan.
- Dot with butter sporadically over the top.
- Unroll the second pie crust.
- Find the center, and maybe mark it with a slight indent with your finger.
- Use a cookie cutter, and cut pieces around center. You can cut out pieces and discard the left-over dough, or you can flip flop between cut pieces and place the cookie cutter piece over the crust in between cut pieces. For the second, make sure you have room between cut pieces to do such a thing. It's easiest to add the cookie cutter pieces after you top the pie. But you can get creative with cutting the pie crust on top and reapplying it as decor.
- Place crust on top of pie.
- Smash the edges with your fingers, pinching together to form the pie crust like shape, or you can instead smash a fork around the edge to seal the crust and make a jagged effect.
- Bake at 425° for 40-50 minutes, until golden.
- This is best served warm with vanilla ice cream.
Notes
Where did I get this recipe for Apple Pie?
First I got the main apple pie recipe from old school Better Housekeeping books. These old cookbooks were the best, and the older ones were better than the newer ones. My mother still has one that is from 1950’s era, the cover is gone, and the book is downright cut in half, and we still whip that one out several times a year. She had one from the 60’s or 70’s that is currently MIA, and I found one from the 60’s on ebay. I forget which book I grabbed it from though. But the important thing here is that of my mother’s two girls, I’m going to inherit the 1950’s one.
Second, I got the idea to make apple pie a breeze when I saw snack apples for my kids. Even when you use those instead of peeling, coring and slicing 7 apples, that took the bulk of labor from the pie. BUT THEN, I one day noticed Pillsbury refrigerated Pie Crust, and that has now taken the rest of the labor from the pie. No more kneading and rolling and needing a bunch of countertop space with wax paper and flour everywhere! Yay!
Third, I got the pie decorating ideas from Arlene Lott in a video shared on Facebook. So A of all, her website has some amazing looking stuff. But also B, her pie idea was so easy, even I could do it. I will try to embed the video of her decorating skillz further down the post.
What makes this Apple Pie Easy AF?
The answer is simple.
I usually end up shopping Walmart grocery. And just about every Walmart grocery I go to has some version of peeled and sliced apples. The refrigerated pie crust I find in almost every grocery store.
Let me explain to you how delicious this is.
I am a picky apple pie eater (from porcupine peak, sorry it reminded me of The Purple Pieman – it’s really fun to say). I cannot do grocery store pies. Not at all. All of them suck. They are way too sweet. Way too starchy.
The only apple pie I like that is not this recipe was Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Apple thingies that were super crispy. The fact that I loved them a lot is probably why they stopped making them.
But this tastes homemade. Like the difference between chocolate chip cookies from McDonalds/Store, and homemade from packaged dough, and homemade from scratch. This apple pie, on that scale, is from scratch.
The Ingredients
1 package Refrigerated Pie Crust (2 crusts). Room Temperature.
24-28 oz of Peeled Snack Apples (aim for 6 to 7 cups of peeled apples)
1/4 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Sugar
2 TBSP Flour
1 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp Nutmeg
1/2 tsp grated lemon peel
1-2 tsp lemon juice
1 TBSP Butter or Margarine
A little extra brown sugar
The Process
I really don’t want to repeat everything in the recipe card (shared at the top of this post for your convenience) here, so I’ll summarize.
- Mix the filling
- Unroll pie crusts and line the pan, add a thin layer of brown sugar.
- Fill Pie Crust
- Decorate the Top with Cookie Cutters and other ideas – get creative
- Bake at 425 for like 45 minutes.
Apple Pie Decorating Inspiration
This is so extra and festive, and SO EASY!
Arlene Lott‘s video tells it all, but just in case that ever comes up missing or the embed doesn’t work well, I’d like to summarize.
The thing is to use cookie cutters and a knife to make shapes in pie dough, maybe add some details to it like an eyeball to a bird and lines for the wings. Get creative.
For roses, she took 4 or 5 small circles, laid them out in a row overlapping halfway, rolled it up, sliced in half, and voila, 2 roses.
She put cream in a spray bottle and sprayed the entire top of the pie. Cream will make it more golden looking. But as I put in my recipe card, you can do cream and egg yolk to give it a golden vibe. Plus you can brush egg yolk, cream, with cinnamon and brown sugar in it to make darker brown sections. This is especially useful on Letters to make it easier to read once cooked.
Here’s another pie topper from her on YouTube for Cherry Pie…
She is just amazing and I love her vibe.
and OMG these are just beautiful from someone else but a rabbit hole is a rabbit hole…
White on Rice couple Todd and Diane Porter:
Now maybe you are inspired enough to come up with something much more original than I did. In my defense, I was in a super hurry. The pie I did pictured in this post above was made in about an hour on Thanksgiving Day with me running late to go to my mom’s, with me screaming, “In a minute” to the kids every step of the decorating process.
So while I have it down as about an hour to do… It’s more fun if you allow yourself more time to be creative. Arts and Crafts time, with pie.
Keep in mind if you use refrigerated pie dough like I did, you don’t have as much to work with. If you want more to work with, you can buy two packs of the refrigerated pie dough 🙂
Pairings
This Comfort Food – apple pie recipe pairs wells with Vanilla Ice Cream and Thanksgiving Dinner.
Looking for more Sweets for the Holidays? You might also like 10 Fun Christmas Cookies to make from the Same Sugar Cookie Dough
Love this on Pinterest!
