This Mini Pumpkin Pie With Graham Cracker Crust is EASY to make and a treat to eat.
Today’s recipe is for the pumpkin pie lovers out there who 1) are watching what they eat and 2) don’t want to play with pie dough.
Now I love me a decadent dessert, and I LOVE playing with pie dough (you have seen my Game of Thrones Deep Dish Frey Pie and Dutch Apple Galette for Two haven’t you?), but I also appreciate a lighter recipe that’s easy to boot, so here’s a lighter pumpkin pie.
In place of a traditional pie crust, I used a brown sugar graham cracker base. It’s pretty much the same one I used in my S’mores Cupcakes , so you know it’s going to be good. And instead of cutting and fussing and shaping pie dough, you just crush, mix, and spread this crust. Way easier, just as delicious.
On top of the graham cracker crust, you have a lighter pumpkin pie custard. Normal pumpkin pie usually uses evaporated milk, condensed milk, or cream in the custard part of the pie, but this pie is made with low-fat milk which slashes the calories, but is still so creamy and good and everything you love about pumpkin pie.
And just to keep things interesting, I added a dab of whiskey-infused whipped cream. You can use bourbon, Kahlua, whatever alcohol you like that would complement pumpkin pie. The boozy flavor isn’t overpowering. It’s just a little exciting and a lot delicious.
This perfect little pie will make 4 to 6 servings depending on how you slice it and comes in at around 200 calories a serving (about 150 without whipped cream). If you are having an intimate Thanksgiving gathering or just feel like pie and don’t want to share with the world, definitely consider this one.
More Mini Desserts
- Small Banana Cake
- Small-batch Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Small-batch Vanilla Cupcakes
- Easy Small Red Velvet Cake
Mini Pumpkin Pie Recipe Notes
- You’ll need a 7 x 5-inch baking dish for this pie. I used a ceramic one for the photos (because it’s purdy), but I usually use Pyrex dishes * for small-batch baking since you can bake in them and then just throw on a lid for storage.
- The normal pumpkin pie “jiggle test” doesn’t work with this pie since the custard layer is not very deep. It will stop jiggling long before it’s actually set. To test for doneness, insert a knife into the center of the pie. When it comes out clean, your pie is ready.
- For convenience, if you stock pumpkin pie spice ( homemade or store-bought *), you can replace the spices in the pie (not the salt) with 1 teaspoon of pre-mixed pumpkin pie spice.
Ingredients
Graham Cracker Crust
- ▢ 1/4 cup graham cracker crumbs ( 2 1/2 ) graham crackers
- ▢ 1/4 cup ( 30 g) all-purpose flour
- ▢ 2 tablespoons ( 25 g) brown sugar
- ▢ 3 tablespoons ( 1.5 oz) melted butter
Pumpkin Pie
- ▢ 1/2 cup low-fat milk
- ▢ 1/2 cup ( 122 g) canned pumpkin puree
- ▢ 1/4 cup ( 50 g) packed brown sugar
- ▢ 1 large egg yolk
- ▢ 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ▢ 1/4 teaspoon salt
- ▢ 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
- ▢ 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ▢ Pinch ground cloves
Whipped Cream
- ▢ 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
- ▢ 1 teaspoon sugar
- ▢ 1 teaspoon cold whiskey or bourbon
Instructions
Graham Cracker Crust
- Preheat your oven to 375°Lightly grease a 7x5-inch baking dish.
- In a small bowl, whisk together graham cracker crumbs, flour, and sugar. Stir in melted butter until well-mixed.
- Press crumbs firmly into your baking dish with your fingers or the bottom of a small drinking glass. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until crust is slightly darkened and looks set.
- Turn the oven down to 350°. Place crust in the refrigerator while you mix your pumpkin pie ingredients.
Pumpkin Pie
- In a medium bowl, whisk together all pie ingredients until smooth. Pour mixture into the slightly cooled crust and bake for 35 to 45 minutes until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean.
- Cool on the counter for 20 minutes before refrigerating for at least 2 hours.
Whiskey Whipped Cream
- Place a medium bowl and whisk in the freezer for 15 minutes.
- Once the bowl is chilled, remove from the freezer and combine heavy cream, sugar, and whiskey.
- Whisk vigorously until soft peaks form, 4 to 7 minutes (much less if using a hand-held electric mixer). Spoon over the chilled pie.
- Serve and enjoy!
These small-batch Bacon Scones with Maple Glaze are one of my favorite recipes from my new cookbook, Baking for Two !
Release day update: Baking for Two is officially on sale as of today!
As you might know, the digital version of my cookbook, Baking for Two, comes out tomorrow (print version will ship on the 21st). It’s all very exciting and also terrifying, but mostly exciting, but mostly I want to throw up, and I probably will not sleep tonight.
Guys, I’m realizing I may not be the very best at handling professional stress/excitement.
Anyway, while I’m busy having my own little melt down, I do hope you’ll check out Baking for Two . So much went into making this book, and I think you will absolutely love the small-batch recipes in there.
And in case you missed my last post on the topic , here’s a quick run down of what you get with this book: 80+ sweet and savory small-batch baking recipes, baking school (taught by yours truly, where I run through common baking ingredients and techniques), and 234 pages of me finding increasingly ridiculous ways of describing how delicious each recipe is. 😉
I love, love, love these mini bacon scones because aside from being amazing and everything good about breakfast food, mini scones are the CUTEST.
LOOK AT THESE TINY TRIANGLES!! Don’t you just want to try to shove an entire one in your face just to see if you can?
As far as scones go, these ones are just about perfect. Soft and a little crumbly. They bake up so tall, are EASY to make, and are exactly the sort of recipe you want in your breakfast recipe arsenal.
They bake with a bit of bacon in the dough, then once they come out of the oven, you add a maple glaze and some more bacon over the top. The end result is these completely adorable, delectable sweet and salty scones that you are going to love.
More Breakfast Treats
- Poundcake Cupcakes (Cupcakes for Breakfast)
- Easy Cream Scones
- Maple Cream Scones
- Strawberry Buttermilk Cake
Bacon Scones With Maple Glaze Recipe Notes
- This recipe only calls for just a bit of buttermilk. Check out my Waste Not post, “What to Do With Leftover Buttermilk,” for storage tips and recipe ideas for the leftovers.
- These scones are, far and away, best on the first day.
Ingredients
Scones
- ▢ 3 slices bacon
- ▢ 1 cup ( 120 g) all-purpose flour
- ▢ 1 tablespoon ( 12 g) sugar
- ▢ 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ▢ 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- ▢ 1/8 teaspoon salt
- ▢ 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, diced
- ▢ 1/3 cup buttermilk
Maple Glaze
- ▢ 1/4 cup ( 30 g) powdered sugar
- ▢ 1 teaspoon milk
- ▢ 1/8 teaspoon maple extract
Instructions
Scones
- Preheat oven to 450°F and lightly grease your baking sheet.
- Cook bacon until crisp, using your preferred method, and crumble or chop into ¼-inch pieces.
- In a medium bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
- Use a pastry cutter, two knives, or your fingers to cut cubed butter into flour mixture until no pieces larger than a pea remain. Stir in 2/3 of the bacon. Reserve 1/3 for topping.
- Use a fork to work in buttermilk until a thick dough forms. Turn out on a well-floured surface and knead 4 or 5 times, until the dough comes together and can be formed into a ball.
- Press ball out to about a 6-inch disk and use a knife or bench scraper to cut into quarters.
- Transfer scones to prepared baking pan. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until scones are just lightly golden.
- Cool scones on the baking sheet for 10 minutes before glazing.
Glaze
- Whisk together powdered sugar, milk, and maple extract until smooth and drizzle over scones.
- Sprinkle reserved bacon pieces over the top of the scones.
- Serve and enjoy!
Creamed Turkey (or creamed chicken) is a simple weeknight dinner that can be made with leftover turkey or chicken. It’s pure comfort food and completely delicious.
So, true story: up until about a week and a half ago, I was dead certain that today was the day after Thanksgiving. At the end of September, I wrote Thanksgiving into my editorial calendar as the 17th (because as everyone knows, Thanksgiving is always the 3rd Thursday of November) and just went on living my life, planning posts, doing whatever it is I do.
This was obviously not even a little correct, as I learned while trying to coordinate Thanksgiving plans with family, so what I’m basically saying is this recipe was supposed to come out the day after Thanksgiving, not a week before it. My stellar calendar and editorial planning skills strike again…
Properly timed or not, today’s recipe is pretty special to me because it’s not just one of my personal childhood favorites, it’s the childhood favorite of basically every other child who had the good fortune to attend my elementary school, it’s Creamed Turkey.
They served this in the cafeteria about once a month while I was there, and I really cannot overstate how big of a deal this lunch was. On Creamed Turkey Day (capitalized), almost nobody brought their lunches from home and teachers gave up their lunch hour to let us eat in the classroom, mostly because they were already staying on school grounds to eat creamed turkey too.
I’ve been told that it’s still served at the school but is no longer made from scratch in the kitchens, so who knows if current generations are still developing a taste for it with the same fanatical zeal, but I for one will always have a place in my heart (and on my plate) for creamed turkey.
So obviously I had to recreate it on the blog. And fortunately, I still have an in at the school and was able to get the basic recipe breakdown from one of the school’s longtime lunch ladies.
Turns out creamed turkey is suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper easy to make. It’s basically cubed, cooked poultry + a roux + a little salt, pepper, and garlic. If you have leftover chicken or, I don’t know, turkey from any holidays we might have coming up, you can make this in about 8 minutes.
We were always served Creamed Turkey over mashed potatoes (if you don’t have a mashed potato recipe you love, give my No-recipe Homemade Mashed Potatoes a try). The internet tells me you can also serve creamed turkey over toast, which sure. If that sounds good to you, you do that. 😉
Creamed Turkey is really just pure comfort food, warm and filling. It’s rich, creamy, and just makes you feel good from the inside out, the way a bowl of chicken soup does on a cold day. Serve with a side of Butter and Garlic Green Beans or Panko Parmesan Broccoli , and your inner child will love it.
More Easy Comfort Food
- Beef Stroganoff
- Tomato Soup for Two
- Ham and Potato Soup
- Easy Chicken Cacciatore
Recipe Notes
- If you don’t have any cooked turkey or chicken on hand, go try out my recipe How to Cook Chicken Breasts to Use in Recipes , and make some! 😉
Ingredients
- ▢ 2 tablespoons ( 1 oz) butter
- ▢ 2 tablespoons ( 15 g) all-purpose flour
- ▢ 1 cup milk any percentage
- ▢ 1/4 cup chicken broth
- ▢ 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
- ▢ Salt and white pepper to taste
- ▢ 2 cups ( 8 oz) cubed, cooked chicken or turkey (warm)
Serve Over
- ▢ Mashed potatoes or toast
Instructions
- In a medium skillet over medium heat, melt butter. Whisk in flour and cook for about 30 seconds until golden.
- Whisk in milk and broth. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until mixture begins to bubble and thickens to the consistency of thick gravy, 3 to 6 minutes.
- Remove from heat and whisk in garlic, salt, and pepper. Stir in chicken and allow to sit over very low heat until chicken is warmed through, about 5 minutes.
- Serve over mashed potatoes or toast.
Mini Pumpkin Pie With Graham Cracker Crust
Ingredients
Graham Cracker Crust
- 1/4 cup graham cracker crumbs ( 2 1/2 ) graham crackers
- 1/4 cup ( 30 g) all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons ( 25 g) brown sugar
- 3 tablespoons ( 1.5 oz) melted butter
Pumpkin Pie
- 1/2 cup low-fat milk
- 1/2 cup ( 122 g) canned pumpkin puree
- 1/4 cup ( 50 g) packed brown sugar
- 1 large egg yolk
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- Pinch ground cloves
Whipped Cream
- 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon cold whiskey or bourbon
Instructions
Graham Cracker Crust
- Preheat your oven to 375°Lightly grease a 7x5-inch baking dish.
- In a small bowl, whisk together graham cracker crumbs, flour, and sugar. Stir in melted butter until well-mixed.
- Press crumbs firmly into your baking dish with your fingers or the bottom of a small drinking glass. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until crust is slightly darkened and looks set.
- Turn the oven down to 350°. Place crust in the refrigerator while you mix your pumpkin pie ingredients.
Pumpkin Pie
- In a medium bowl, whisk together all pie ingredients until smooth. Pour mixture into the slightly cooled crust and bake for 35 to 45 minutes until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean.
- Cool on the counter for 20 minutes before refrigerating for at least 2 hours.
Whiskey Whipped Cream
- Place a medium bowl and whisk in the freezer for 15 minutes.
- Once the bowl is chilled, remove from the freezer and combine heavy cream, sugar, and whiskey.
- Whisk vigorously until soft peaks form, 4 to 7 minutes (much less if using a hand-held electric mixer). Spoon over the chilled pie.
- Serve and enjoy!
