Hello my wonderful wintery friends!

Today was just one of those days where you think about a quick treat you desperately want and do all in your power to make it. These pumpkin pie cheesecake empanadas were something I dreamt up last night. I needed these pumpkin pie cheesecake empanadas  in my stomach, desperately. I couldn’t last more than a few hours without trying my hand at them and once I did, I was so incredibly happy with the results. These are so incredibly easy to make anyone could make them!

 

Ingredients

1 package of Pillsbury’s refrigerated pie dough

Filling

1 15 oz can of Libby’s Pumpkin Puree

3/4 C of Sugar

2 tsp of cinnamon

2 dashes of nutmeg

2 dashes of ginger

1 pinch of salt

2 large eggs

¼ C of cream cheese

1 additional egg for an egg wash

1. You can totally make empanada dough from scratch and that’ll be a recipe I’ll teach y’all very soon. However, I had this package of refrigerated pie dough just all up in my fridge taking up valuable ice cream space. If you know me, you know I value my ice cream space. You’ll want to take the refrigerated or frozen pie crusts out of the freezer about an hour ahead of time. They need to thaw in order for you to use them. You can also heat them through the power of love which just means you hug it every so softly until it gets all warm from your loving body heat (I don’t recommend you use the power of love method).
2. Since your pie dough is thawing, you’ll want to go ahead and make your pie filling. I made this filling while pouring out my desires to eat these empanadas in each step. I told the pumpkin puree it was a beautiful shade of orange and I could swear I felt it blush. Tell the cinnamon how spicy it is! It’ll go in there and work harder to make the pumpkin cheesecake empanadas even more delicious! Do this, I promise it’ll make the recipe 100% better. Add all of your filling ingredients MINUS the cream cheese in a bowl, then stir. It’s that easy!
3. You can have the pumpkin pie cheesecake empanada filling just relax in the fridge while your dough thaws. I used a large mug to make the empanada rounds. I’m going to guesstimate that the mug was about 3 1/2 to 4 inches wide. You can also make these bigger but I wouldn’t make them smaller. Keep in mind that if you make them bigger you’ll have less dough to work with so these amounts really depend on how big you make the. Each individual 9 in pie dough makes up to 8 empanadas of that size (at least it did for me). I made about seven then re-rolled some of excess last piece which makes 8. So go ahead and cut out your rounds!
4. You could use sweetened cream cheese or make some sort of cheesecake filling but I wouldn’t recommend it. I just spread about 1/2 a tsp of cream cheese to each empanada round and added the pumpkin pie filling to that about 1 tsp. I feel that if you pre-sweeten the cream cheese it’ll result in an overly sweet empanada. This is what it should look like:

5. I almost forgot! Don’t forget to preheat your oven to 350 degrees and make your egg wash. You can make the egg wash by scrabbling an egg a bit and adding either a 1 tsp of milk or water.

6. Seal your empanadas with a fork, place them on a lined cookie sheet, coat them with the egg wash, and bake from 10-12 minutes or until golden.