Sweet Potato Pie Puffs

I love puns.

They're the perfect joke -- groan-worthy, too quick for the unsuspecting to dodge them, delightfully cheesy.  And puns that go along with food are even better!  No one can complain all that much about them without running the risk of not getting any food, and no one in their right mind is going to run that risk, so.

I bring this up because this particular recipe was the final course of a meal that consisted of:

• Potato soup
• Roasted carrots and parsnips (& other veggies)
• Root beer bread
• Ginger ale (the good stuff from Trader Joe's, mmm)
• Sweet potato pie puffs for dessert

Each dish involves a root vegetable, so I called the meal "Root Access."  So far, I've gotten two groans and a good handful of "oh god that's so good I hate it" responses from the peanut gallery, which I'm counting as a complete win.

You don't have to make these as part of a Root Access meal, but they're super good with it.  Highly recommended little treat, this.  Give it a go!

Sweet Potato Pie Puffs

Ingredients

1 medium sweet potato
1 tsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 sheet puff pastry
2 Tbsp butter, melted
3 Tbsp white sugar
1/2 tsp molasses
12 walnuts

Instructions

1. Peel and wash your sweet potato.  Slice it 1/2-3/4" thick, then cut those slices into 1"ish pieces.
2. Steam the sweet potato pieces for 10-15 minutes, or until very soft.
3. Preheat your oven to 375*F once the sweet potatoes are steamed.
4. Add the maple syrup and cinnamon, then mash the daylights out of the sweet potato, until it's all smooth.
5. Defrost the puff pastry just enough to make it flexible, but not warm and floppy.
6. Cut the pastry into 12 equal pieces.  This is easy on the ones I buy because they're tri-folded, so I just cut along the folds, then quarter the sheet the opposite direction.
7. Curve each piece of pastry into the cups of a 12-cup muffin tin.
8. Scoop the sweet potato mixture into each pastry.  I use my little melon baller for this, just to establish a baseline equality among all the pastries, then add in what's left and smush it around with my finger to make it fill the pastry.
9. ... smush the sweet potato around to make it fill the pastry (it will not melt out and spread as it cooks).
10. In a small cup, melt 2 Tbsp butter.  Mix in the sugar and molasses.
11. Spoon out the butter/sugar mixture onto the tops of the sweet potato mash.
12. Press a walnut into the top of each pastry.  We really like walnuts, so I'll put one whole walnut and some broken pieces atop each of mine.
13. Bake at 375*F for 20-25 minutes, or until the pastry has turned a nice golden brown.
14. Remove from oven and allow to cool just long enough to make it so you can touch them.

I find these to be REALLY heavy, for all that they taste pretty light.  I can only take down one in a sitting, unless I've just biked home from work.  Then I can put down two easily.  To reheat them, microwave them 15 seconds, then heat them in the toaster oven.  Yum.

(I couldn't for the life of me come up with a Star Wars tie-in for this recipe, which tells me I need to rewatch the orig-trig this weekend.  I'll be making some of these as bribery to get my long-suffering partner to watch them with me.  The fact that this will work as a bribe tells you how good these things really are.)