Ways To Use Up Leftover Pie Dough And Puff Pastry

For many people, the best part about making pastries and pies is having leftover pie dough and puff pastry to repurpose into other fun items. If you're not sure what to do with yours, you're in the right place because we have plenty of great ideas for you. Whether you like sweet or savory, baked or fried, there are tons of ways to repurpose pie dough and puff pastry.

So, go ahead and buy a double package of pie crust and that big package of puff pastry because there's plenty you can make with it. Once you realize all that you can do with pie dough that's not making a pie, you're likely to look forward to having extra dough on hand for all the little special treats that are possible with it. We've compiled a list of 15 sweet and savory items you can make from extra pie dough or puff pastry that are all sure to please.

There are several ways you can add cinnamon and sugar to your leftover pie crust and puff pastry to turn it into a delicious treat. Some are soft, while others are more crisp. Cinnamon rolls are a great treat to use up your leftover pastry. 

To make faux mini cinnamon rolls, spread out your leftover pastry dough, sprinkle it with plenty of cinnamon and sugar (and maybe even melted butter), roll it up into a cylinder, and cut it into rounds before baking between 350 and 400 F for 8 to 12 minutes. You can even frost them like regular cinnamon rolls when they're done. Doing the same thing with leftover pie crust turns the crust into something that's more like mini cinnamon roll cookies. They won't puff up like the other version, but they're still delicious and taste great with frosting. There's also a version of this treat that's a little more crisp. Simply sprinkle your leftover pie dough scraps with sugar and cinnamon, cut them into whatever shape you want, and bake them flat. All versions are delicious.

If you're more in the mood for a savory snack, you can also turn leftover pie crust scraps into pie crust crackers. These are tasty enough to add to a charcuterie board, but you may just want to hoard them all for yourself. They have all the flakiness you love from pie crust with a sturdiness that allows you to use them for dipping into your favorite cracker dip or topping with cream cheese. Some people even eat them with soup.

They're ridiculously easy to make. Simply roll out the pie dough as usual, sprinkle it with olive oil or butter to help it crisp and brown, cut it into whatever shape you'd like, season the crackers, and bake them at about 400 F for 8 to 10 minutes. That's all. There are lots of different directions you can take them depending on your tastes. Raid your cabinets for seasoning mixes that might taste good with them, like everything seasoning. You can try Italian seasoning mixed with fresh Parmesan cheese or with fresh herbs (like rosemary) and sea salt.

Pigs in a blanket and mini sausage rolls both make fun appetizers and satisfying breakfasts. Plus, they're a yummy way to use up puff pastry dough. There are several options for what you can stuff inside them, ranging from miniature little smokies sausages or hot dogs to link sausage or ground pork sausage. Some people add a layer of Dijon mustard inside, while others add cheese. Even though there's plenty of flavor in the sausage itself, you can go a step further by adding your favorite mix of herbs or seasonings like everything seasoning inside or outside the roll.

To make your pigs in a blanket or sausage rolls, add hot dogs or sausages down the middle of a pastry crust square, roll the dough around the pork, and press the seams together. If using a large square and lots of meat, cut the cylinder into bite-sized rounds. If you want to ensure that the sausage pigs in a blanket or sausage rolls have a nice, golden brown exterior, you can add an egg wash before baking at 400 F for 20 to 25 minutes.

Skip the bakery when you're craving a sweet pastry for breakfast and use up your leftover puff pastry to make your own. One option is to make a large filled pastry for sharing, while other options include making a dessert resembling a Danish or making individual fruit turnovers.

To turn your dough into a breakfast pastry, you can use fresh fruit to make a thick pie-filling-type mixture, or simply open up a can of fruit pie filling from the pantry. Some good options include cherries (with or without sweetened cream cheese), apples (with or without caramel sauce), blueberries, or any other fruit you like in your breakfast pastries. To make fruit breakfast pastries, top or fill the puff pastry dough with pie filling, and bake it at 400 F for about 20 minutes. If you want it extra golden brown, be sure to add an egg wash before you put it in the oven. A sugary drizzle wouldn't hurt either.

When it comes to enclosed pies, you've got a range of options from sweet to savory. Seemingly every culture has a version of enclosed pies that are easy to transport and eat by hand without much mess. So, the sky is the limit on what you put inside your fried pies.

Some more familiar versions include enclosed hand pies with fruit fillings, Cornish pasties, Latin American empanadas, Italian calzones, and Indian samosas. While the original recipes sometimes call for a different type of crust, adapting the recipe to use leftover dough works just fine. Of course, what you add inside is up to you, depending on the flavors you're craving. You can even use hand pies as a vehicle to get more holiday leftovers into your mouth. After enclosing your sweet or savory filling in a square of dough, you'll need to crimp the edges so that nothing escapes. Then, you can either deep fry them in hot oil until the dough turns a lovely golden brown or bake them at 350 F for about 20 minutes.

Leftover puff pastry dough is perfect for making open-faced mini tarts. The size and shape is up to you. You could make mini round tarts or cut them into squares. There are tons of toppings for tarts, so what you want to fill them with is up to you.

To make a fresh fruit tart, you start with a pre-baked pastry shell and then top it with pastry cream, fresh fruit, and a brushing of jam to make it glossy. For a baked fruit tart, you should bake the fruit on top of the dough at 400 F for 13 to 16 minutes. There are tons of topping options for savory mini tarts. You can add your favorite breakfast items like eggs and cooked breakfast meat before baking it in the oven. Vegetable versions like asparagus tarts and sun-dried tomato tarts are also delicious, especially with the addition of cheeses like cream cheese and Parmesan cheese.

If you only have a little bit of pie dough left over, you may not be able to make full-sized pies, but you can make mini pies. Even if you don't have mini pie tins, you can use a muffin pan to make them. For sweet pies like mini cherry pies or mini apple pies, you'll need to divide your normal pie filling between as many mini pies as you can make. It should only take 10 to 15 minutes to bake them at 400 F.

If you're more in the mood for a savory pie, you could turn them into something like mini chicken pot pies or vegetable pot pies. If you're serving them in a mini pie dish or other baking dish, you could put the crust on the top. Otherwise, you'll need to put the crust on the bottom to help contain the pie for cooking and eating. Of course, you can always make full-sized pot pies if you have more crust or if you want to make a lattice top.

If you just have a little pie dough or pastry crust, it's easier to make a cobbler than a pie. With a traditional fruit pie, you need a bottom crust to hold it all together. However, with a cobbler, the crust is all on top, and the baked fruit is free-flowing in the dish. So, even if you have just a little bit of dough left over, you can make a full-sized dessert. It's great with a variety of fruits, including berries, peaches, and apples.

For a cobbler, you can make a lattice or shapes on top with the leftover dough. It doesn't have to be particularly pretty since all the baked dough is just going to fall into the liquidy fruit when you start serving anyway. Add an egg wash and a sprinkling of sugar over the top of the dough before baking for 20 to 25 minutes at 400 F.

Apple pie cookies are a fun treat that you can look forward to any time you have a bit of leftover pie dough or puff pastry dough. You can make them either with premade apple pie filling or a couple of apples from your fruit bowl. If you don't have premade filling, you can make some by cooking chopped apples with brown sugar, vanilla, a squeeze of lemon juice, and apple pie spice. If you don't have a jar of apple pie spice, you can make your own with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, and cardamom.

For the pie crust version, you'll place the apple pie filling between two circles of pie dough, and bake them at 400 F for 12 to 15 minutes. For the pastry dough version, you'll add the pie filling after baking. Cut pastry dough into circles and make a round indention in the middle before baking at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Then, push the indented area down to make a hollow to hold the pie filling.

Mini quiches are also a great option when you just have a little bit of crust left without enough to make a full-sized quiche. You can use either pie dough or puff pastry dough for these, and can make them using muffin tins or without.

If making it with muffin tins, start by making round disks of dough big enough to fill the bottom and sides of the tin. Then, fill each mini crust about three-fourths full with a mixture of your favorite quiche ingredients, like cheese, breakfast meat, and green onions. Next, pour a mixture of eggs and milk (five eggs to one cup of milk) containing salt, pepper, and garlic powder to finish filling each mini quiche. Finally, bake it for 20 to 22 minutes at 375 F.

If you don't have muffin tins, it's still possible to make it with puff pastry squares. Bake the squares in a 395 F oven for 15 minutes without the filling. Then, make an indention or partial hole in the middle of the square, and fill it with quiche ingredients and egg mixture like above before baking for an additional 15 to 20 minutes.

Nutty pie crust cookies can be like a nuttier version of cinnamon pie crust cookies, and can even be made fancier if you add more ingredients to the filling. They're a great way to use up dough when you have a lot left over after baking. One simple topping you can use is chopped nuts (like pecans), cinnamon, and sugar. A fancier version includes brown sugar, eggs, shredded coconut, almond slivers, and melted butter.

One way to make these cookies is to place the topping on the crust, bake for 17 to 19 minutes at 350 F, top with a powdered sugar drizzle, and cut into squares. A great alternative is to roll out your dough, place the filling over the top of the dough, and then roll it into a cylinder to cut into small disks before baking at 400 F for 9 to 12 minutes.

If you like ice cream, Blizzards, Concretes, and other ice cream treats flavored with pie, you don't necessarily have to go to places like Dairy Queen or Andy's Frozen Custard to enjoy them. If you have leftover pie crust and some pie filling, you can make your own.

The easiest way to make a copycat Blizzard involves starting with baking plain pie crust (maybe adding a sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar) in the oven for 9 minutes at 375 F. After the crust has cooled, crumble it, and add it with the desired pie filling to a bowl of ice cream. The ratio of pie filling to ice cream should be about one to six. Blend everything together with a blender until it's well-mixed, and enjoy. If you'd prefer a milkshake you can drink with a straw rather than a Blizzard you can eat with a spoon, add about as much milk as you do pie filling before blending.

While leftover puff pastry dough won't make a real pain au chocolat (chocolate croissant), it will make a passable version that won't require remotely as much work as the real thing. You're likely to love them just as much. Dark or semi-sweet chocolate is traditional for pain au chocolat, but you can use whatever chocolate you have on hand.

Pain au chocolat are incredibly easy to make. Simply cut your pastry dough into rectangles, place a piece of sweet chocolate or chocolate chips in the middle, fold to enclose, brush with an egg wash, and bake for 15 to 18 minutes at 400 F. After they're out of the oven, dust them with powdered sugar, and they're ready to enjoy. Alternatively, you can make them look more like croissants if you have enough dough to cut into long triangles. Place the chocolate toward the bottom of the triangle and roll it into a cylinder from the thick bottom to the pointy top before baking as usual.

If you've ever made chicken and dumplings and pie from scratch, you'll realize how similar the dough can be. The main difference is that dumplings often use self-rising flour or plain flour and baking powder, while pie crust doesn't usually have any leavening ingredient in it. So, the chicken and dumplings you make from pie crust won't be as puffy as usual, but they will still be tasty.

To make the dumplings, cut the pie crust into small squares or rectangles. Then, add the raw dumplings to the creamy sauce and chicken mixture from your favorite dumpling recipe during the last 15 minutes of cooking. One of the easiest dumpling bases includes shredded rotisserie chicken, a couple of cans of cream of chicken soup, diced onion, diced celery, and garlic. Once you've checked to make sure the dough is cooked through to your liking, the dish is ready to serve.

The convenient thing about using leftover puff pastry dough to make palmiers is that they normally already start with a sheet of puff pastry dough. Even if you just have a single sheet or half a sheet of puff pastry left, you can still make these delicious cookies. They're best with pieces of crunchy demerara or turbinado sugar for optimum texture, but you can use granulated white sugar or brown sugar if those aren't available to you.

To make them, sprinkle the dough with sugar, mash the sugar into the dough, and fold the two outside edges of the dough to meet in the middle. Then sprinkle the top with sugar again and mash it into the dough before folding the dough in half in the same way you would close a book. You'll need to refrigerate the dough for half an hour before cutting it into rounds, sprinkling it with more sugar, and baking it at 425 F for 18 to 20 minutes.