Sweet Pie Crust Recipe (2024)

Vegetarian

Table of Contents

Pie Baking 101: Easy Perfect Pie Crust Recipe

This sweet Pie Crust recipe is one of those recipes which you should probably stick on your refrigerator door! I am serious when I say that it is just too hard to come across foolproof & easy pie crust recipes which would give you a perfectly flaky and buttery tart shell for your pies and tarts. In this post, I have shared pie crust recipe with butter in two ways. One with egg and another eggless for those who prefer eggless baking.

Here, I will show you how to make a sweet pie crust without a food processor. All you need is a handful of ingredients and around 30 minutes on your hand. If you follow my recipe for a mildly sweet pie crust, then you will get a perfect tart shell for your dessert. You can then make yourself A Lemon Tart or a Strawberry Tart as I have done here. In fact, I have also used the same recipe for sweet pie crust with butter to make Minced Pies for holiday baking.

In this post, I have also shared a recipe demo video on how to line your tart shell. I am sure this will come handy when you have your pastry dough ready and you are just about to prepare your tart pan for baking.

How to make a Sweet Pie Crust with Butter & Eggs?

For this, you need basic ingredients like All-purpose Flour, Butter, Cold Water, Egg & Sugar. That’s it. Pantry staples like these can give you a buttery and flaky pie crust that is perfect for so many desserts. The detailed recipe is below in the Recipe Card section, click “Jump to Recipe”

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The best thing about this recipe is that it makes enough dough for 2 shortcrust pastry tart bases or 1 tart having a shortcrust base and latticed or patterned top. You can bake half of the dough and freeze the rest for it for later. You should bake with the second half of the dough in a month’s time or so.

During holidays, usually, I have a lot of baking on my list so I make the dough and divide it in two and freeze them for later use. Later, when I am ready to use them, I simply take them out and allow it to thaw on my kitchen counter for a few hours. Once it’s soft enough to be pliable, I make the shortcrust tart base as required for the recipe.

How to make an Eggless Sweet Pie Crust with Butter?

The only difference is that the egg is replaced by ice-cold water that brings together the dough. Here, more or less rest of the ingredients are the same. I will write down the recipe in short here:

For an eggless sweet pastry dough, here’s the ingredients list:

1 cup APF or Maida
1 cup Chilled Butter cut in cubes
2 tbsp Powdered Sugar
3 tbsp Cold Ice Water

Here’s the step-by-step process of making eggless sweet pie crust pastry dough:

Combine sugar and flour. Add the chilled butter cubes and break the butter using the fingertips while mixing it with the flour mix. Keep doing this till there are no bigger lumps of butter are left.
Now, add water, one tablespoon at a time and bring everything together into a dough. Once you see everything coming together into a big lump, stop kneading. Do not over mix.
Cover the bowl with clingwrap sheet and refrigerate for 20 mins for it to rest.
When you are ready to bake, pre-heat the oven at 180°C and prepare the pie crust for the tart shell as shown in the video
Bake the pie crust shell at 200c for 5 minutes and bring down the temp to 180c and bake it for 15 minutes