To Hell With Pastry!

I'm getting into cooking these days, so one day while musing upon the remains of a roast chicken dinner, I decided to make my first chicken pie. Which it turned out was a rather fiddly procedure, accompanied by such strange concepts as 'shortening', 'baking blind' and running your hands under the cold tap so as not to overheat the pastry mix. Not to mention working out how much pastry you actually needed.

Anyway I stuck with it, rubbed up the flour and butter, cut out all the panels for the base and sides, and produced this:

which was voted a success (bearing in mind that to criticise another's cooking is to take on the burden oneself). 'Baking blind' was mentioned at this point. As were 'beads'. WTF?

However, butter is a bit of a no-no these days, so I came up with the brilliant idea of using a pizza dough mix for the pastry. A lot less work (fewer ingredients and you can use the bread machine) and a better grip on the amount (just use the usual three pizzas quantity).

Which produced this:

as voted a success and just as delicious.

This still needed a lot of fiddling with the panels however, as with making a stitch-and-glue plywood canoe (another story) where at least templates were provided.

However in another blinding flash I realised that if I just split the dough into three, as if making pizzas, I could make individual pies by just wrapping the fill up and baking in a stand-alone fashion.

Which produced this:

with the edges folded to the top and sealed. For some reason I was reminded of the pods in 'Alien'.

Another success!

Although the unbaked 'pies' did have a tendency to unfold, so I finally settled on this:

which is a sort of Cornish pasty I suppose.

The only way I can think of to simplify things further is to chuck EVERYTHING into the bread machine, a bake the result into a sort of conglomerate of chicken in a pastry matrix, but I'll hardly get away with this. I can't find any examples on the Web, so here's a picture of a lithological version, which gives an idea of what the result might looked like, although the colours would of course be different.