Pizza Bites

These perfect appetizers are light and airy one-bite sausage pizzas made with puff pastry and oozing with six cheeses.

Pizza is a great no fail party food because nobody doesn’t like pizza. Right? But regular slices of pizza can fill you up and then you don’t have room for anything else. That’s not fun. 

These little gems are perfect one-bite pizzas that taste just like the real thing, except that they’re light and airy because they’re made with puff pastry. You can have one or two and still have room in your tummy for other goodies, or you can eat a few, which is not hard to do because these Pizza Bites are delish! And the kids will love them too. 

That is, unless you have little ones like my two and half year old twin grandkids who were very suspicious of these “pizzas” that didn’t look like pizza. Even when Sunny told them it was a pizza, they didn’t believe her. They had that “you can’t fool me" face as they shook their heads. 

I used Italian sausage, but you could use pepperoni, salami, beef, chicken, or whatever you like to have on your regular pizza. You could even go veggie on this one. I also used a 6 cheese blend because I just happened to see that it came shredded and in a package, which always makes life easier. It had mozzarella, provolone, parmesan, romano, asiago, and fontina. Wow! But you could use any cheese of your liking. It's all good on a pizza.

Instead of pizza dough, I decided to use puff pastry because I wanted it to be a light appetizer. They’re puffy and delicate and absolutely sing in your mouth when you pop one in. 

Makes 18

• 1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
• 4 oz. Italian sausage or about ¾ cup raw
• ¼ cup pasta sauce
• ½ cup shredded cheese (I used a packaged 6 cheese blend)
• ½ cup shredded mozzarella
• 36 black olive slices
• snipped chives for garnish

Cut the thawed puff pastry into three strips. Roll each strip into a length long enough to get six squares. Push each piece into a mini muffin tin, pressing the edges outward. Bake at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes. Remove from oven. Do not turn off the heat.

They will puff up and rise in the center, so use a wooden spoon handle and press the center down, but don’t break through the bottom.

Squeeze out the sausage from the casings and cook in a heated frying pan, breaking the meat into bits. Remove from heat and mix in the pasta sauce and cheese blend.

Fill each pastry cup with the meat. Top with the mozzarella shreds, 2 pieces of olives, and snipped chives. Bake another 2 to 4 minutes. Serve warm.