This 4-Ingredient Recipe From Pioneer Woman Is the Perfect Party Appetizer

Each holiday season, three wonderful friends and I get together for a meal. Sometimes we host it at someone’s house. Sometimes we go to a restaurant. This year, I hosted the dinner at my home and kept it pretty simple. I made a vegetarian lasagna with no-bake lasagna noodles. My friends brought cocktails, bread, and salad. I pulled a few bottles of wine out of the cellar.

The morning before the dinner, I panicked a little. Maybe I should have something to nibble on before we dig into the full meal, I thought. I knew that whatever I made had to be an easy appetizer. Then I recalled a Pioneer Woman recipe I had seen just a day or so before: Cranberry Brie Bites. It had just four ingredients, was sufficiently holiday-ish, and with one small change to the original recipe, took me only five minutes to prep.

The Pioneer Woman’s Cranberry Brie Bites

For her recipe, Ree Drumond rolls out puff pastry dough, cuts it into small squares, and places each square in mini muffin tins. Then she fills each with a little Brie, a dollop of canned or homemade cranberry sauce, and a sprinkle of pistachios. The bites are baked at 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) for 15 minutes, cooled for five minutes, then sprinkled with optional flaky salt before serving. While there are specific measurements for the Pioneer Woman recipe, I believe precision is not super important for a straightforward recipe like this.

Case in point: Despite the recipe's simplicity, I wanted to make things even easier. So I swapped in mini phyllo dough cups for the puff pastry, and with that one simple switch, I made a delicious starter in a fraction of the time it would have taken to roll out and cut the dough into smaller pieces.

All I had to do was place the phyllo cups on a baking sheet, add a square of Brie, a spoonful of cranberry sauce, and a sprinkle of pistachios—which I already had stored in the freezer—to each cup. I kept the baking directions the same, popping them in a preheated oven at 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) for 15 minutes. Of course, I also brought out my Fleur de Sel to sprinkle over the cups once they came out of the oven.

Improvising this recipe worked wonderfully for me, but if you like having extra guidance, you could follow our step-by-step recipe for Brie cups. And if the flaky, buttery bits of puff pastry are more your lane, then there's also this recipe which is very similar to the Pioneer Woman one.

Ideas for How to Adapt This Recipe

Cranberry sauce screams “holidays!” but by swapping in jam or chutney and switching up the nuts, this recipe can easily become a quick hors d'oeuvre that works any time of year. Here are some ideas to get you inspired:

• Mango chutney and chopped cashews

• Raspberry jam and chopped walnuts

• Apple chutney and chopped hazelnuts

• Apricot jam with chopped almonds

On the night of the dinner, my friends and I devoured the phyllo cups as we drank cocktails and sipped bubbly that paired beautifully with the meal—specifically, a bottle of Dr. Konstantin Frank Blanc de Blanc from the Finger Lakes wine region in New York. It was such a breeze to get these on the table, these bites are certainly going to be my new go-to appetizer anytime I need something quick, easy, and absolutely delicious.

Read the original article on ALLRECIPES