Tiny Peach Pies

These were made for an evening meeting of ladies at my church. I made four pans of two dozen each, but this recipe is for making one pan full, or two dozen little pies. For the crust I used the crust of pecan tassies, from a little recipe card in my files. For the filling I adapted a recipe for deep dish blackberry peach in Ken Haedrich's seminal tome: Pie.

Ingredients
1 stick of butter
3 oz. cream cheese
1 cup flour
2 large ripe peaches
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
dash of nutmeg
zest and juice of half a lemon

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Cream together butter and cream cheese. Add flour and mix until it all comes together in a dough. Divide the dough by rolling into a log and cutting in half, then each of those in half, then those in half, and finally cut each of the eight pieces in thirds. This should ensure fairly even divisions, depending  how careful you are with your halves and thirds.

Place one piece in each hole of a 24-piece mini-muffin tin. Using a mini-tart shaper (I got mine from The Pampered Chef, but they are available many places) dip in flour and then press the dough down until it forms a little cup. Prepare the filling.

Cut each peach in half and peel off the peel. Make two slices parallel to the first cut and then put your stack of three flat-side-down on a cutting board. Cut straight down in a criss-cross pattern to form about 1/4-inch dice. You should end up with about two cups of diced peaches. Mix with the rest of the ingredients. I used a small portion scoop to spoon about 3-4 teaspoons of filling into each little cup. In any case, use up all you made, spreading as evenly as possible. Bake for 20-25 minutes.