Whewy, Monday was a rough day. Mondays are usually just another day for me, but this past one was a Monday Deluxe. Dead car battery. Angry readers. Changes of doctor appointments. Unhappy baby. Tired Moody Momma. Etc. Etc. Etc. Makes for a rough day. It was a day that called for pizza...lots of pizza. Pizza cheers me up. And Doughnuts. Sadly...I didn't have either, and the dead car battery made getting pizza (or even pizza ingredients to make it at home) a 40 mile round trip hike that I wasn't willing to take. I'd have even gone for a tiny little palm sized pizza, but alas...it was not to be. What do tiny pizzas look like you ask? I'll show you. 
http://www.rhodesbread.com/recipes/view/2094
Don't those look yummy?! Mmm, I want one. And how cute?! You could use heart cookie cutters for valentines day, shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day, pumpkins for Halloween, etc. Perfect! I seriously want to try these out, but since I can't at this exact moment I'll show you a submission we received from Miriam and her adventure.
"I was having a little Christmas get together and thought these mini cookie cutter pizzas would be a great treat for the kids. Simple, just use Christmas cookie cutters to cut out shapes from pizza dough, add sauce, cheese, whatever. So I bought refrigerated pizza dough and rolled it out, cut shapes, then tried to lift the extra dough off, leaving the tree, candy canes, etc to be decorated. Only the cutters didn't cut through all the way. So it started stretching and tearing. And pizza dough is a little sticky. Yeah. I tried to lay it all down back where it was and re cut the shapes with a little more force. Come to find out, it only takes one little area to stick and things go wonky. So new plan, I will just redo it by smushing up the dough, flattening it back out, and recutting. Hmm, this worked better in my head! It was not universally flat, and I was struggling. So my husband stepped in to save the day. They didn't look THAT bad before going into the oven. However, the end result speaks for itself."
The Pinstrosity:
Not the pretty shapes from the original pin, but it's pizza. It doesn't have to be pretty to taste good (have you caught our theme on food yet? We'll pick good tasting and not so pretty over beautiful and inedible any day).
But what if you want beautiful and tasty? The key here lies in the original directions. The Pinterest caption wasn't wrong, it just wasn't complete. You do roll out the dough, cut it with cookie cutters, top it, and bake it...but there are a few steps in-between. The "pizza dough" in the original pin is actually Rhodes Roll dough. 
http://www.rhodesbread.com/recipes/view/2094
Now really quick let me make sure you know we're not getting compensated by anyone to link to Rhodes or to tell you about them (we don't ever do those kind of posts). They are the authors of the recipe and the creators of the original pin image, so we link to them and use their directions.
So, in case you didn't just read the recipe I'll summarize. They have you take a thawed, but still cold, ball of dough, flatten it out to a 4 1/2" circle, and cut it with a cookie cutter which was dipped in flour. This is where Miriam first ran into some trouble. The cookie cutter didn't quite cut the dough all the way through. Rhodes' fix? Have a small knife handy to cut away the extra connected dough. You can see that here in their tutorial video:
Not too shabby!
If you watched the video and/or read the recipe, you also probably caught the fix to the problem of the dough puffing up during baking and pushing the toppings and sauce off. What is the fix? Pre-baking. Before you add sauce or toppings, you want to bake your dough shapes for 8-10 inches. In the video we're told that if the dough starts curling up on the edges (or puffing up too I'm sure), then pull the pan out, flip the dough over, and return the pan to the oven. After you pre-bake, you top the crusts and then bake again. The pre-bake is the key to keeping the cute little shapes for your pizza crusts.
Lessons learned today? Pre-bake, and caption your Pinterest pins well!
Happy pizza creating!
Ooh! Now I want a Pinstrosity cookie cutter to make Pinstrosity Pizzas!