American Pie

Another up-cycled mini dessert: Pie.  Did you ever pick up a beer bottle cap and think, "This would make a great mini pie pan?"  I have a collection of them, just waiting to be needed for something.

 When I found a block of brown Sculpey clay at Goodwill, I knew it was time for pie.  The pie filling was created with a variety of junk including seed beads, Perler beads and epoxy.

After pressing clay into the caps, I used a sewing pin to make grooves around the edge (the way you would use a fork to press the edges of a real pie).  For the blueberry and cherry pies, I filled the crusts with blue and red seed beads.  To make the top, I cut strips of clay, wove it to look like a pie crust, then set it on top of the pie and trimmed the excess.  The pies and empty crusts baked in my oven for ten minutes.

For the pecan pie, I filled the crust with brown crystals from a sun catcher kit and covered with Crystal Clear 3D Lacquer.

Using an X-acto knife, I cut a few orange beads into 'peach' slices and put them in a baked crust with the lacquer.


The key lime pie also uses Perler beads.  White acrylic paint makes the cream colored base layer and translucent green Perler beads create the citrus-y top layer.   Melting them in the crust while baking wasn't successful, so I had to come up with another way to melt them.  By setting the pie in my straightening iron I was able to soften the beads.  After placing a sheet of parchment paper on top of the pie, I squished the melted beads into the crust with the handle of a make up brush.


The whip cream dollops are white Perler beads melted and squished with the tip of a hot glue gun and the lime slices were punched out of green foam.  To make them, see the mini cake post.

Meringue pie also turned out to be a challenge to make. The fluffy meringue is made of white Perler beads. Again, the hot glue gun was used to melt and meld them together. I pushed the tip into the beads and twisted as they melted.  It was time consuming, but resulted in a beautiful whipped texture.



After the pie cooled, I used several shades of beige and brown acrylic paint on the the peaks of meringue to create a baked look.
Baking these tiny pies made me want to bake a life sized, edible pie.