New Spin on Rollie-Pollies

If you've been a frugal baker all these months, and have dutifully saved all the scraps of pastry whenever you've baked a pie, these are truly quick and easy.  If you haven't, then you have to make some pie crust, and the whole raison d'etre for these homey little tidbits ceases to be.  I actually have been saving crust bits, but I really felt like I'd hit the jackpot when I realized that Woody had wrapped and saved all the unused pastry he'd made when he and Rose came to Minneapolis to demonstrate how to bake a cherry pie.

Blessedly, Woody's leftover pie crust was in one big circle, rather than in the unformed bits that made up my bag o' pastry scraps, so I didn't have to try to press the strips together to make a rectangle, an instruction I didn't fully understand.  I just trimmed the edges of the circle and, amazingly, got a rectangle.

Then I rolled the dough into two long, thin rectangles, and sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar.  Just like I used to do many years ago when my mother had leftover pie crust.  We never called them anything, but we did love to eat them.  We rolled them into spirals, so I guess we could have called them rollie-pollies (or, as I would have spelled it, roly-polies, since "rollie" looks like it should rhyme with "dolly.")

I couldn't quite get the hang of how to shape these.  The oblongs I cut them into with the first batch were too long and narrow.

They didn't look anything like Rose's.  Not that that's unusual.  Part of Rose's "new spin" is that they're more attractive than your grandmother's rollie-pollies.

That attractiveness is only theoretical.  Still, you can tell that the dough is going to be crisp and flaky, and the cinnamon and sugar smells delicious, as cinnamon and sugar tend to do.

I really liked these.  But they're oh, so tempting to have around.  And you can easily talk yourself into having more than one because, really, they're just a bite or two.  And, as there's no chocolate or cream, how caloric can they be?  I can't wait to see how I rationalize eating next week's chocolate bread pudding, which contains both chocolate and cream.  But that's next week.  For now, I'll enjoy the relative simplicity of these rustic bites.