Furlough Monday Peach Dumplings (plus an apple dumpling)

 

My summer internship is now furloughed on Mondays, and while that normally wouldn't affect me, I needed to make up some hours so Mondays felt especially empty. So after finishing up at my volunteer position, I went home and made peach dumplings. I pretty much based them off of this recipe . She called them Individual Whole Peach Pies but I always called the apple version Apple Dumplings so I applied the same nomenclature to peaches. Regardless of what you call them, they're delicious. I just had a couple of tweaks to her recipe (but they are fine as written as well.)

 You need the following:

1 crust of pie per 4 peaches
4 peaches, halved and de-pitted. Aim for small-medium rather than medium-large
1-2 T Honey per peach
~2 T ground cinnamon
~2 T granulated sugar
1 egg, scrambled in a dish with a splash of water
Your favorite de-pitting utensil. 

Preheat the oven to 400, you want the topmost rack in the center. You can use a muffin tray or a jelly roll pan. I prefer the jelly roll pan with silpat since my dough got stuck in the muffin cubbies and they were impossible to remove and still look nice. However, with a jelly roll pan your dumplings are in danger of sliding apart (see below.)

Wash, split, and de-pit your peaches. I used a santoku knife to split (I love the santuku, BIL did a good job picking out a wedding gift, think it was him anyway, whoever it was got a nice Thank You card. Friend L who did our mugs also did an adorable caricature for them), and a paring knife to de-pit with a spoon for particularly stubborn pits. 

Split the crust into quarters and roll out farther (I found a standard 9" to be too small without making it thinner, but if it were thicker it would probably hold together better). Set the deeper side of the peach in the center and fill with honey and a pinch of the cinnamon-sugar mixture.. Top with the other half and fold in the edges of the crust, I made a sort of dim sum dumpling (I forget the proper name) shape. Make sure to pinch the edges!

Once all are on pan (good luck getting them to sit upright), brush the tops (I did everything but bottom) with the egg wash and sprinkle liberally with the cinnamon-sugar mixture. Bake for 15-17 minutes. Serve warm.

Addendum: I pretty much follow the same thing for apple dumplings, core the apple instead of halving and de-pitting and use butter and apple pie spices (nutmeg, all spice, cinnamon, granulated sugar) in the middle. Takes a little longer and I bake at 350 since apples are denser. I also use more dough but for the life of me I can't remember how much more.