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My grandpa Frank was famous for requesting the same thing for dessert every time our family got together—so much so that we invented our own word for it: "wonofitch," i.e., “one of each,” i.e., “a slice of every type of pie we have plus obviously a scoop of ice cream too.” Frank did not invent this move, but he did perfect it, turning the practice of sitting down with a sliver of pumpkin, pecan, and apple into a sacred annual tradition. I preach the wonofitch lifestyle every time I host a dinner party; I always make at least two desserts of contrasting but amicable flavors—a flourless chocolate cake and pecan-cranberry galette, for example, or a pear crisp and a salted caramel tart. For any cold-weather celebratory meal, offering a bevy of treats is a no brainer. Or at least, it usually is.
Because you're probably not gathering a big crowd together for the holidays this year, making multiple desserts might seem like overkill. I'm paring down my normal army of sides to just two or three to account for my small crew, but the sweets array is one tradition I refuse to shelve. To keep myself from having a ton of pie leftovers (though of course there are much worse fates), I'm using small pie dishes to make slightly shrunken versions of my favorite seasonal desserts, creating a much more manageable end result that is still part of a sugary selection.
A note: I am not recommending that you buy “individual” pie pans, those superthin, two- or three-biters that might house a personal lemon tart on an event buffet table. Unless you think you're going to get into the tiny baking game with regularity, I'm not convinced that those dollhouse plates deserve a spot in your kitchen. Instead, this is the year you should expand your baking collection to include a pie pan in the “miniature” category, falling between four and seven inches across. The difference between these tools and a standard nine-inch pan will open up ample space on the table (and in your stomach) for another recipe or two.
Scaling a standard recipe down to fit into your mini pan pan will take a little math, but I promise it's nothing you can't handle. The pans I've linked to below are all six inches in diameter, which I find to be the perfect size: the slightly reduced pie is substantial enough to feel like a real dessert (rather than a cutesy allusion to a full-blown treat) but won't saddle you with a bunch of slices at the end of the night.
To adapt a recipe to fit in a different sized pan, first divide the area of one pan by the area of another to get your multiplier. When scaling down from a big pan to a smaller one, as we're doing here, divide the area of the small pan by the area of the large pan. Multiply all of the ingredients in your recipe by that magic number to modify it to fit the new vessel. To move from a nine-inch pan to a six-inch, you'll multiply everything in the original recipe by 0.4528, or 0.5 if you want to round (if you halve the recipe, you may end up with a biiiit more filling than you need, so use your best judgement when loading it up).
Rounding is fine so long as you apply the same practice to every ingredient, and so is eyeballing partial ingredients—though if you'd like to be precise, you can use a scale to determine ⅔ of a tablespoon or half of an egg by weight (for whole eggs, beat them first before measuring). The one thing to look out for in adjusting your pie recipes this way is total cook time. Start checking on your mini pies early and rely on the testing and visual cues that recipe calls for—like “golden brown and is set in the center”—rather than the minute marker. Your guests, however few of them are around your table this year, will thank you.
