5 Easy Ways To Decorate A Pie Like A Pro (Without The Fuss)

Hi from my kitchen here in Los Angeles. We are talking about pie design today. I thought I would pop up and do a live because this one is a little bit kind of intricate and I wanted to kind of show you step by step how to do it. Today we launched a post on BiggerBolderBaking.com about pie design. Now I'm not a big person when it comes to like very finicky things but I'm going to show you really easy ways how to do pie design that is, that you don't just need like a few pieces of equipment, nothing too fancy or special and these all can be done at home and you're going to end up with really good looking pies. So for those of you who want to check the pies, the posts that I'm doing, go to BiggerBolderBaking.com and you can see all the designs there and I just want to say thank you to everybody for tuning into my live. It is a little busy here in this household today, I've got a little bit of a baby who's having his breakfast and is not too happy but we're going to power on. So the pastry that I'm using today, just I'm going to wait for some people to join us before I get stuck into the pie design. The pastry that I'm doing is my pie crust and you can use any pie crust you want. If you have to use store bought pie crust, that's fine, please just buy a good quality pie crust when you can, it just makes a big, big difference. Pie crust is really, really easy to make and I've got a video on YouTube about how you can make that, it's really, really easy. Any questions that you have, any comments, any queries that you have, please ask them in the comments and Zach will be able to get me them, will you Zach? Yeah. So ask any questions that you have and you know because it's baking season, it's November, you know sometimes people only bake this time of year, November and December for the holidays so you might be a little bit rusty. So any pie questions, any you know make ahead desserts for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for Hanukkah, whatever it is, let me know, I'm here to answer your questions for the next half hour and show you some really easy pie designs while I'm doing it. So let's start out by rolling out a pie crust. So that usually at a party on a Thursday, I don't go live, I put out a pre-recorded video and this week, the season, the holidays have been so busy and there's so much going on so we thought we would do a live instead. Someone asked, do you recommend an all butter pie crust or no? All butter, yes, always, I use all butter, I think maybe you're referring to all butter and some, I would say butter and lard. I don't use lard or Crisco in my pie crust, some people do and they swear by it, I've never done it. You know I know a lot of like big bakeries who do use like Crisco or lard in their pie crusts and personally, I go for all butter. I would stay away from margarine because it's soft and when it comes to pie crust, you need cold butter, you need big chunks of it. The colder the butter, the better your butter, the best results you're going to get from your pie crust. So your butter really, really does matter because what happens is, I'm going to nerd out a little bit here, but when it comes to baking your pie crust, you have a cold pie crust going into a hot oven, you've got big lumps of butter, it gets in there, it hits that hot temperature, we always bake pies at a hot temperature, the steam rises from the butter, it evaporates and it rises up your pie crust. When you think of puff pastry, croissants, all those kinds of things, rough puff pastry, you need a hard, cold butter to do that, margarine is not going to do the same thing. So, just keep that in mind. Okie dokie, I'm going to roll out a pie crust, just roll it out to, like bigger than your pie pan, I have a pie pan here, these are 9 inches round, so like bigger than your pie pan. I'm going to show you an easy one first, what will I show you? I'm going to show you a cut out. So, I'm going to roll it out a little bit longer, or sorry, a little bit bigger than what I've done now. So, I have a silicone mat here, I find this really useful, but just do it on your counter top. And don't be afraid to use flour when you're rolling out your pie crust, usually I would say go easy on the flour, but sometimes it's just, it's easier to manage, it's easier to work with, like don't make life more difficult for yourselves. Now, here we go. Quick question, so I'm going to ask a question. How do I make a vegan pie crust? With vegan butter? I, I, I'm not, I, I'm not. Sorry, without vegan butter. Without vegan butter. Off the top of my head, I don't know the answer to that question. I, I, we have a vegan pie crust on Bigger Bolder Baking, but it's, or sorry, a, a cookie, a crust, but it's not really a pie crust. Let me think about that and try and get back to you, let me think about that. That's a tough one, that's not easy. I do know though that you can buy a lot of vegan pie crusts in the store and they're really good quality. Someone said you can use vegetable shortening. Vegetable shortening, yeah, that's a good idea, that's a good idea. It goes back to like vegetable shortening can be quite soft, but if that's great, if you can use vegetable shortening, that's, that's perfect. And that's a really good idea. And, and also, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. So here I have some fall cutters, apples, maple leaves, just regular leaves, acorns. Go into your cutters. I have, I, the only time I bring out my cutters is this time of year. I have a huge tub of cutters and, but when I need them, they're really important. So what I want you to do is just pick a seasonal, fall-ish cutter. If you're doing apple pie, do an apple cutter. Here I have a little leaf, which is kind of perfect for fall, this time of year, for Thanksgiving. I've rolled out my pastry nice and big. And all I'm going to do is go around and cut out randomly some leaves. I'm going to hold this up afterwards so you can see it. But we're going to, when you cut out your little leaves, save them, pop them over here to the side. You can do this in a design if you want, or you can just kind of cut it out, for want of a better word, willy nilly. And that's totally up to you. But this is just a really easy way to get a simple design on top of a pie crust. And to make it look really professional, just like you got it at the pie store. Because you know what? I noticed, especially here in LA, I used to live down the road from a bakery in Santa Monica, and pies were like $50, $60. Like, that's crazy. That is absolutely bananas. I must go, like, I should go into the pie business. I'm in the wrong business. Make your own pies. It's really easy. It's not that expensive. It shouldn't cost you $40 to buy a pumpkin pie. And they're all the same. If you ask me, they're all the same. Cut out a few leaves like this. Any more pie questions, Zach? Yeah, making a pie, do you use butter? Yeah, yeah, you know, you use egg wash. Use egg wash to stick to stick. Which flour should they use to roll the pie crust? All-purpose flour. Just use regular all-purpose flour. Honestly, that's not the biggest deal. If you only had bread flour, that's okay, too. All-purpose flour is generally what you would use. If you had a gluten-free flour, that's all you had to hand use that. That one's not as big of a deal. Good question, though. I don't know. So I'm trying to figure out what I'm making for Thanksgiving. Because we're doing Thanksgiving here in our new house in LA. So I'm trying to think of what pies I'm doing. I'm doing an apple pie. But I was thinking, I don't know if any of you guys know, I have a fudge and pecan pie on the website that I made a few years ago. And it's like a brownie in a pie shell with pecans on top. It's really good. It's Kevin's favorite. So I'm probably going to make that. But I think I might pass on a pumpkin pie this year. I don't know if I necessarily need it. We're having people over. A lot of them are from Europe. I don't know if we need a traditional pumpkin pie. I've got a question. Oh, that's a really good question, Barb. That's a really good question. Certain pie crusts are only used for certain things. Pate Sucre is a pie. It's not really a pie. It's a pastry. But that's generally used to be blind baked and then to be filled afterwards with fruit and cream and creme patisserie and stuff like that. Short crust pie crust, also known as short crust pastry, also known as pie crust here in the US, those are both the same thing. Those are really your go-to pie crusts. Pate Brisee, which I've got a recipe coming out soon on Bigger Bolder Baking this week, actually, is a different pie crust. It's a little bit more butter. That also works well as a pie crust or a blind baked pie. I would say stay away from puff pastry. Not pie crust. That's not what's supposed to be used for pie crust. So stay away from that. Rough puff pastry, you can use as pie crust. And I'll tell you how I know that. My mom makes her mince pies, and she uses her rough puff pastry, which is the same one on my website, to make her mince pies. And it's really good. I would have said no to that, but I tried it, and it's really, really good. So let me show you a little trick about moving pie crust. This is really important because it can be finicky. Roll your pie crust over your rolling pin. Roll it back over your rolling pin. This is why we have flour on our countertop. Make it easy for yourself to move. Roll it over your rolling pin. This is how you move it. And then gently, this is all about control. I'm trying to see where I'm at. Lift it up and roll it back over your pie crust. Or your pie, like that. Oh, look at this. This is gorgeous. Oh. I'm going to hold this up so you can see it in a sec. Really sweet. Pie making, for those of you out there, are people worried or afraid of pie making? Pastry is a really, really easy thing to make. It's not actually finicky. It's not. It's really easy to make. It's basically half the amount of fat to flour. A little bit of egg or water or something like that. Really easy to make. Not a big deal. I strongly recommend trying to make it yourself. Make your pastry now and put it in the freezer. That's what I do all the time. I have my pastry over there that's been in the freezer for a few weeks now. Just make it and put it in the freezer. Then you have it ready to go. You can even line your pie crust already. Cover it. Put it in your pie pan. And put that in the freezer. So then just make your filling on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Look at that. I'm going to just crimp these edges down a little bit. I'm going to press the edges. If you want these edges to stick, another good idea, I think somebody asked this earlier, was do a little bit of egg wash around your rim and then your pastry will adhere to it really well. So here's what I'm going to do. I don't have, oh sugar, I forgot my egg wash. Okay, I'll do a little bit of water just for this sake. I've got my pastry brush. Do egg wash for this part because egg wash will also help it stick but it will also make your pie crust nice and golden brown and shiny. And if you don't wash your pastry with pie crust, it can be a little bit dull looking. So do with egg wash. It's too early in the morning for me. Remember these little guys that we cut out, these little leaves? Go around the rim of your pie. I'm going to show you this for a sec just so you can see what I'm doing. You see that Zach? Go around the edge of your pie crust and stick those on. And remember there's egg wash around here so those will just stick on beautifully. Pie crust only shrinks. Yep. You know what? That's the most common thing, Jane, that can happen. I'll tell you there's a few different reasons why that happens. The biggest reason it happens is pie crusts made with water. So going back to evaporation and nerding out a little bit, just bear with me for a sec. You make pie crust with butter, flour, and say no egg, you just do water. That water evaporates when it hits the oven. So just think about that water gone. So if you're removing something from the pie crust, it's restricting. And it's shrinking back. So water's gone, the pastry shrinks. So that's what often leads to shrinking pie crust. It's because you had too much water in your pastry. Really, really common mistake. I've done it for years. It was only until a long time after doing it I realized what the problem was. It's very easy. You can replace that water with yogurt. You can replace it with egg. You can replace it with sour cream. Even cream cheese. There's lots of different things you can do to replace that. And it will stop having that effect. Then there's other things like just the making of the dough. Overhandling of the dough, that's important. I would say when you're making pie crust, a really, really easy way to make pie crust, do it in your food processor. It is the best way to make a pie crust. It's fast, it's no mess, and it avoids you having to touch the pastry, having to handle it, having to warm up the butter with your fingers, making it extra fatty. It just does it so fast. And then you always end up with a beautifully fluffy, layered pastry. You get small amounts of butter all the way throughout because of the blade in your food processor. Strongly, strongly recommend making pastry on a food processor. So there you go, look at that. Can you see that, Zach? See? Super easy. So I didn't have a… All I had to make this pie was this one little leaf cutter. It's all I had. And you end up with this gorgeous looking pie. So now what you want to do is egg wash all of this. Make sure you get it nice and egg washed so it stays nice and shiny. Into the oven, nice and hot. And you have a beautiful pie. And you know what you can do? Do this the night before. Do this the night before you're having guests over. If it's Thanksgiving, do it on the Wednesday. Get your pie all ready like this. Then on Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon, whenever, pop it into the oven. So you have it ready to go. You're not messing around with pastry on Thanksgiving Day. Nobody should be doing that. Get it all done ahead of time. So I'm really happy with that. Pull it back. Sorry, I went too far. So there's that one. Let me show you. I'm going to go, because of time wise now, I'm going to go… I think I might show you a lattice next. Just because that's a little bit more complicated. And remember, for all these pie design ideas, go to BiggerBolderBaking.com. I have videos step by step. Sorry, videos. Sorry, I don't have videos. I've got photos of each pie design and instructions of how to do it. We've got some new fans. Sure. Thank you everybody for tuning in to my live today. I am Gemma Stafford, professional chef, host of Bigger Bolder Baking, cookbook author, and pie queen. And today we are talking about pies and pie design because it is the season. We're crazy for pies right now. And I want to make sure that you guys are well equipped to make your own pastry, make your own pie filling, and just deliver a beautiful, show-stopping pie to the table on Thanksgiving Day. So there we go. We did that little one there. You call that, I suppose, a cut-out pie crust? I'm not quite sure. One quick question for you. So let me show you. Make your pie crust. These were made ahead of time. You can keep it… If you make it, put it in the fridge 24 hours. Don't keep it longer than 24 hours. I'll tell you why. It starts to go grey, the flour starts to turn, and it starts to go a little bit rancid. So 24 hours. Make your pie crust now, wrap them up like this, pop them straight into the freezer, label them, pop them straight into the freezer, then take them out when you need them around Christmas, around Thanksgiving, whatever it is, and let them defrost in the fridge. Pastry cannot be kept in your fridge for days on end. It will go bad. So make it. Make it now. Get it out of the way. Pop it into your freezer. Makes life so much easier. And it rolls out perfectly. It bakes perfectly. Freezing pastry is the best way to go. Okie dokie, Zach. Let's do a lattice, because that's a little bit harder, and I want to make sure I fit that in. Someone asked, what's your opinion on laminating? You know, I don't… For those of you who know Bigger Bolder Baking and know me, I don't really… I don't… I'm not an expert on laminating doughs. I generally try and do the quick, easy step. I fold it, I grate in frozen butter into my pie crust to give you that lovely flaky effect, but I don't generally laminate doughs. It's a really good idea. For those of you who have the headspace to be able to laminate doughs, go back and forth, have the time, it does make a difference. It really does. However, I still get really good results without laminating doughs. I don't know if it's a patience thing or whatever, but I just kind of… I'm really no-fuss, and even though laminating does give you really good results, I just stick to the regular way. It's just easier for me. Less stress. So here I'm going to show you how to make a lattice pie crust. Roll it out nice and thin. There we go. So roll out your pie crust. Try and get it to almost a rectangle rather than a round. And we are going to take a pizza cutter. You can use a knife, pizza cutters are just really easy. And we are going to cut out big, thick lattices. We're not going to do skinny ones. We're going to do big ones. Oh, look at that. That's hilarious. Okay. Then, let's see. Nice, big, thick lattice. Someone asked, wood rolling pin or metal one? What's your opinion on metal ones? That's from Pam White. So, I don't really have an opinion. I usually do have an opinion on everything. I don't really have an opinion on metal, I tell you. I don't use them, so maybe that's my opinion. It's just that I prefer to use wooden. I just always use wooden. It's what I grew up with, what my mum had in the kitchen. Actually, my mum had a plastic one, now that I think of it. But this is just always what I use. It's always what you have in kitchens. I don't generally use metal. I don't know why. I think it's just one of those things that you're used to. What are the benefits? Or are there any pros or cons? I'm actually not 100% sure what the answer is to that. But I should look it up. So, here's what we're going to do. I cut out a few lattice here. Nice and thick. Let me see how thick they are. So, just some lines. They're around 2 inches thick. I made these nice and thick because it just gives you a more impressive looking pie. There we go. So, I lay three strips down like that. Just like that. I think I'm going to need more strips. So, you can do more strips if you want. But because I made them so thick, we're going to do three strips. Now, lattice is really, really easy to recreate. It looks complicated because it's woven. But it's really not that hard. Let me see. I'm going to roll out. I'm going to do this. I'll do this first. So, you lift up two of your lattices. Or your two strips. Put a piece of pastry down. And then fold that back over. Then, you do, lift up two pieces, leave one down. Lift up, the next time you lift up one piece, leave the other two down. Zach, can you see that okay? Pull it back. Like this. There we go. Do it again. Pull this up here. Bring that down like that. So, you bring that one down. Now, we're going to lift these two up. I'm going to roll out another little piece of pastry for myself. Just to get those last two pieces of lattice. Someone asked, what pastry mat are you using? That's from Maureen Verne. Maureen, that's a really good question. After this, I'm going to do an Amazon Live. I got this on Amazon. It's a really good pastry mat. It helps with rolling out. The good thing about this is you only need a small bit of flour. You don't need a whole pile of flour. And it has the inches on it. So, you can roll out. You don't have to check or whatever. It has everything that you need on it. So, I find it really useful. The name of it, I'm not quite sure. If you tune into my Amazon Live after this, I'll be featuring it on there. Sup, Jen? Sup? Hi, Tyler. Not much, just making pies. Okie dokie. So, I'm going to do another strip here. Someone asked if you were a humming band. Was I? Is that possible? I'll tell you what. I was listening to Christmas music earlier. When we were doing our test, I was just singing Elmo with George. No, it is absolutely possible because I started listening to Christmas music on Tuesday. So, lift this one up. Put this one down. Because you know why? I'll tell you why I did that. Last year, I started listening to it too late. I didn't see enough Home Alone. I only saw National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation two times. It was like, that's not enough. You need more of that. So, I started listening early to make sure that I get enough Christmas in before the big day. Because it all goes by so fast. It is a thing, yeah. I don't know if it's really a thing thing, but you put it in little jars, lids of jars, and then you do your pie crust, you do your filling, and then you do a little lattice on top and stuff. Okie dokie. So, can you see that, Zach? There. So, I don't know. I hope you could see the folding back and forth of what I was doing. It's really easy. You just lay a few pieces down. I lay down three, lift one of them up, lay a piece on top, put it down, lift the other two up, lay a piece on top, and you go back and forth between the one and the two, or if you're doing five, two and three, whatever it is. But if you see, if you do it nice and thick like this, really big, you just get this kind of really, I don't know, there's something, you can't see the pie filling, but there's something really satisfying and professional looking about this that it just looks really good. But that's a lattice. It's really easy to do. Do it ahead, just like we did the other ones and have it ready to go into the fridge, into the oven, into the fridge the night before and then into the oven the next day. Okay, what do we do next, Zach? Someone asked a question, but I don't know if I can. Cherry Rays asked, what's the difference between a pâté sucré and a pâté brisé? That's very good. Sucré? You said this, that was right, brisé. The difference is quantities. We had this discussion here recently in the house because we made a pâté brisé for the website and I had to look up and then we were having this conversation of aren't they both very similar but they're different. Pâté sucré, is that the one that's generally used to be blind baked and filled later with creme patisserie, cream, fruit, things like that. When you see those fresh fruit tarts, that's generally pâté sucré. Pâté brisé can be used for pie crust and I didn't know that until recently because Ami, my culinary assistant, she made it here for us and she made a pie out of it. So I was surprised by that. The difference I want to say is quantities and a little bit of sugar. I think a little bit of sugar is a little bit of difference but they are very similar but generally pâté sucré is not used for pie crust. Pâté brisé can be. That's great, thanks Juan. So the bake-a-thon is coming this Saturday. It is for No Kid Hungry who I've worked with before. You guys might have seen that over the last few years. We did this also last year. We did a bake-a-thon and the line-up this year is insane. We have some top chefs from all around the US. Even actually we have, even outside of the US, we have Duff Goldman and we have Joanne Chang, Brian Hart Hoffman, we have, oh my gosh my head, Tamara Mowry, we have Bill who was the chef from the White House. There are so many people in the line-up. It's going to be a live on Saturday. It is going to be cooking segments. 1pm. 1pm Pacific, 10 Pacific, 1 Eastern, live on Saturday and we're going to be doing cooking segments. This is all baking. So all your desserts questions, your pies, your whatever it is. There's going to be make-ahead desserts. There are going to be some pies but there's going to be lots of other things as well. I'm going to be doing dinner rolls just an FYI. Dominic Ancel is a part of it which is very exciting and he's going to be making this croissant stuffing which I've never heard of before but it sounds insane. So a really amazing line-up of talented people. You can go to nokidhungry.com and find out the information there but go to my social media biggerbolderbaking.com and my Instagram today and you can find all that information there. Also look at my stories but that's very exciting. We try and raise money for No Kid Hungry. We have some amazing donors this year and it's really great because last year we did it and it was fantastic and this year we just blew it out. So I want to say thank you to Kevin because Kevin is really the organiser behind all of this with No Kid Hungry and bringing it all together and we've been working on this for quite some while since the summer time so I'm excited. I'm excited for that so I hope everybody tunes in for that. I'll see you Saturday for that. You know what I'll do Zach? What will I do next? This is a really fun one. No matter what your pie is spell out the pie the filling the flavour whatever it is on top of your pie with little cookie cutters. So roll out your pie crust just like we did before and remember this post can be found on biggerbolderbaking.com you can see photos and step by step directions of how you can also just looking at the photos on my website it gives you a really good visual of how to do this. Okie dokie. So now here I have a cherry pie. Let me just roll this out a little bit more. I have some cookie cutters put that there. I have some cookie cutters that are ABCs. You can find these on Amazon they're really inexpensive they come in really useful especially when it's somebody's birthday for special occasions things like that. Here's what I'm going to do that's not a cherry pie that's a strawberry pie here's a cherry pie. I'm going to spell out you can spell out strawberries but it's very long I'm going to spell out cherry and place the letters on top of the pie. So I'll do a few Cs really really easy. Make sure that your cutters are not too small because you want to be able to see what it spells out. But yeah you can do this with any type of pie pumpkin pie, pecan pie even though you don't usually put pastry on top. Cherry we'll do a few Hs like this. So we're not going for a crust on the top of this one we're going to spell out cherry on top. It looks really beautiful. Any more pie questions out there? This is a good time to ask because it's not last minute we're ahead of schedule we're getting all of our pie information out there right now so you guys can make your own pie crust, make your own pie fillings, mix it up a little bit this year and make make different types of pies you know like pecan and bourbon pie. That sounds good. I have a lot of people asking about pie tips with pecan pie some people say it was like getting a little grainy some people say it kind of oozes out. Do you have any general tips about pecan pie? You know that's a really good point. It can ooze out. I'll tell you when it doesn't ooze out. Lots of times maybe when you get store bought pecan pies it's made with corn syrup. So I make my pecan pie with maple syrup so kind of like a more pure sugar but it can ooze out a little bit. If you're looking for that kind of thick center I think people use dark corn syrup which I normally wouldn't gravitate towards. Golden syrup is another really good substitute. You can buy golden syrup on Amazon. Golden syrup in replace of the maple syrup and that will give you like a thick for want of a better word a gelatinous kind of slice of pecan pie and that works really really well. The maple syrup because it's runny it does tend to get kind of soft and ooze out a little bit but not too much. That's what I use. That's a good question. Let's move on to E's. Thank you Tracy. Tracy on Facebook. Yes I do. So I use all different types because I have all different types. Do I have a preference? No there is a difference in baking time. If you want I'll tell you you usually get a crispier pie crust or crispier pastry when you do it in a pie tin rather than ceramic because just because of the wall because of the material you know it's the thinner wall in your pie pan and the heat penetrates differently and it kind of really gets in there and heats up that pie crust so you get a crispier pie crust. So if you're looking if it's something that's like maybe has a wetter feeling like an apple pie or something that's a really good option so you get your pie crust nice and crispy. Ain't that the truth? Yeah it's not my first rodeo. Thank you for that I appreciate it. The preference I'll tell you what if you're looking to bring a pie to the table ceramic is generally what people go for or glass. Excuse me I'm getting over a cold. So honestly it's up to you preference I think it's okay just know that the ceramics and glass generally like Pyrex generally don't get your pastry on the bottom as crispy that's it and there is a little bit of difference in time baking yeah I think it takes a little bit longer in Pyrex or ceramic. That's a good question. There's a few reasons why you would do the main reasons sheet pan will get preheated so sorry excuse me what's the word I'm looking for that will get hot so your pie pans but think of your tin your pie tin going on that you're guaranteed even more to get a crispy under like a bottom pie crust because it's sitting on a hot tray so that's one reason why you do that another reason why you do that is pies can leak and they can spill out so it's pretty important to put your pie on a rack and even when you think it's not going to happen 45 minutes later into baking and you see apple juices pouring down onto your cooker top and into the side of your oven and that's not nice so yes put it on a pan that's a good idea and if you want line the pan because if your pie does overflow and then you don't have a pan to clean you just put put a bit of like tin foil or parchment on there and then just clean it off easy okay I picked out a few of these that took me a little bit longer than I wanted to let's do I'll do it around the edges or I'll do it around here cherry cherry pie now like I said make sure you get maybe my cutters might be too big but pick bigger cutters so you get bigger numbers I'm sorry not numbers letters we're getting over a cold here in this house so my brain is still a little bit foggy cherry and but yeah so keep an eye on my website because we have new recipes going up every day and I have new pie crusts with pie tips I have a guide make ahead guide for Thanksgiving I've got a guide to help you get through the holidays Christmas is coming around the corner pretty fast and I've got a lot of recipes coming up around then ways to prepare ways to get organized I spelled cherry wrong I spelled it c-h-e-e-y g cherry c-h-e-r-r-y there we go I'm gonna show I'm gonna show I'm there you go so my letters might be a little bit small make them a little bit bigger and put it out all around and you can kind of overlap them I'll do one more cherry and I'm gonna get a little bit of water because here's a quick question how long do you keep fruit pie before it goes bad? after baking it I'm guessing so after baking it I'd say like three days three days that's long enough and if you want anything to last longer keep it in the fridge that's just you'll get a day or two longer out of it if you keep it in the fridge I found these on Amazon and I'm going to be doing the Amazon live after this and I'm gonna I have the product features there so if you want to join me on Amazon live after I have all these products so there you go cherry did I spell it right again? there we go okay so that one's gonna take a little bit more time than the other ones but it's still a fun one it's worth it go over if you look on my website we did we did a cherry one there too and it's and it just looks really good what am I gonna do next oh I know what I'm gonna do next I'm gonna do two I'll do I'll do another one do you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna show you the geometric one this is pretty insane yeah Kerrygold's the best that's the difference and European butter ours is saltier there's different like regulations for and rules about like how much salt you can have in butter in Europe also think about it like this you know a lot of these questions that I get asked they have practical answers so if you think about it like this I come from a country where it rains non-stop so the the grass and the countryside is lush and green and there's loads of grass for cows to eat all year round so if you think about cows being outside eating like fresh lovely green grass they have they're like they're happy they've got good diets they're full and happy cows yield great dairy products great milk great cream great butter so that's why it's one of the reasons it's like our our climate gives us this lovely butter it's salty it is rich it is like perfect for baking great on toast and I have it all the time I buy it here in the US and I buy it on Costco Kerrygold is actually one of our sponsors for the No Kid Hungry event on Saturday which is very exciting and like all day long I would say Kerrygold it's expensive though you know it's it's pricier than other butter I will tell you though that in California pound for pound Kerrygold is not I buy it at Costco it's not more and not that much more expensive than a Californian butter so I generally go for Kerrygold and then when I do a lot of baking for the show and things like that I sometimes buy a cheaper butter just because we have to use so much of us okay I'm going to the geometric one now this is a pretty like gnarly looking one I have to admit so Ami my culinary assistant she made this for our website I had to look up a YouTube video to figure out how to do this because it just looks like complicated and like how on earth do you get those results but it turns out it's really easy and I'm going to show you how excuse me I'm getting over a bit of a cold so I want to thank everybody to tuning into my live excuse me sorry we all came down with a cold in this house and thank you for tuning into my live I'm Gemma Stafford today we are talking about pie design and I'm the host of Bigger Bolder Baking and I'm a cookbook author I currently have a very raspy voice so I apologize for that it's a lot of talking going on this week and yeah so we're talking about pie design go back to the start of the live if you want to see from the very beginning and also comment below any questions you have I'm going to be here let's see what time it is I'm going to be here I'm going to do one more pie design any pie questions you have dessert questions for the holidays get them in now get ahead of the busy season and I'm here to problem solve with you so let me know any questions you have let your pastry nice and thin now here's what we're going to do we're going to cut with my with my roller again my pizza roller we're going to cut some thin strips they don't have to be perfect thin strips of pastry and we're going to make a pretty incredible design on top of our pie like I said I had to I literally had to Google how to do this because I just had no idea my strips might be a little bit thick but it's really simple even for me and I usually I don't have the head for this kind of stuff but the thing about it is like I mentioned earlier pies are expensive this time of year and if you can make your own one at home you know what you can do also let me tell you in preparation for the holidays and the busy season do up your pie have them ready to go pop this whole pie cover it up well with cling wrap pop the whole thing in the freezer the whole thing the night before Thanksgiving or the night before you want to put it into the fridge to defrost next day pop it into the oven that's all your dessert work done really simple okie dokie so let me show you this this is called a geometric pie design now this is I've never seen this before until this year I thought it was fascinating I may just get my here we go here is my we do this one so get a cookie cutter scone cutter whatever you want it doesn't matter what size really put it in the middle of your pie and here's what we're gonna do lay the pastry strips around your pie like this just like this this is some stuff you'd see on Instagram that just blows my mind that I'm up at 11 o'clock at night watching so you layer strips on top of each other and you lay them as you go you're going around the cutter in the middle so let me show you more like this so you're going diagonally just keep on going diagonally around and around the cutter where am I going now oops it's a bit short so we go around and you just keep on going and you know you keep the space kind of tight not too much space in between and all you're doing is following the shape of the cutter and just keep on going around diagonally I'm gonna just roll these out a little bit longer almost there Someone asked on Facebook, this is Elephop on Facebook, can you use buckwheat flour instead of regular flour when you're making a gluten free pie? You know buckwheat flour can be a little bit finicky I would say err on the side of caution and maybe don't if you're looking for gluten free and also buckwheat is heavy if I were you I would say I would get some 0 sorry 1 to 1 gluten free flour all-purpose gluten free flour that's going to give you the best results I wouldn't say a nut flour I wouldn't say anything else gluten free one for one all-purpose flour and that can be replaced exactly the same amount of all-purpose flour as for gluten-free flour it works the exact same way so I would say definitely do that just to eliminate any kind of problems there we go last piece Daisy so there look at that you saw me do that in real time and this like this is only like one of a few times of me doing this and you get that pie design what you do is you go around the edges and you trim like this this is called geometric pie design if you google this it'll come up and go to bigger bolder baking calm and I have pictures of how you can do it they're really simple and not one bit fussy even though you might it looks like wow how did you create that it's very simple you take this out of the middle and then you have that lovely pie design at the end that's it very very simple geometric pie design here's a good question Murdo on Facebook asked are different decoration designs more appropriate for different fillings like does some filling need to be more covered in order to bake better yeah that's a really good question and I know the answer to that because I made the mistake one year of doing an apple pie and I did the cutouts just like this there were raw apples I did the cutouts just like this and what happened was the steam escaped from the pie and my apple stayed raw so I didn't get that lovely like cooked filling in the middle at all they stayed like raw apples I couldn't even eat it so if you have a cooked filling and or if it's blueberries or strawberries or something like that that cooks down really fast then this kind of this is peach filling in here and this type of design is perfect if this was raw apples under here I would say don't do that it's a really good question if you're looking for something that needs to keep you know like whatever cooks like cooks longer apples take a long time to cook give do a top like the lattice do something like that for the cherry now you should have lots of cherry because this takes some time but you should have lots of cherry all the way around here but do it on a filling that maybe is already cooked like a pie filling like a cherry filling like strawberries or blueberries and that will make your life so much easier because you don't need to keep in the steam there to cook your fruit so that's a really really great question and let me just show you the pie designs that we did we did a lattice like that we did the cutout design like that we did cherries when you got a few cherries on there but we did some cherries and we did the geometric one check that out really simple pie designs head over to biggerbolderbaking.com I've got photos and instructions of how you can do all of these but I think this live actually is the best way to show you how to do it in real time and they're simple it's not that hard I'd really love to see you guys making your own pies this holiday season and if you can make your own pastry it's not as hard as you would think I want to say thank you to everybody for tuning into my live I really appreciate it if you haven't had enough of me yet I want to see more pie making I'm going to be going over to Amazon live now at 1030 this morning and I'm going to be showing you a few of the products that I use to create these different looks of pies so join me over there always keep a very close eye on biggerbolderbaking.com follow me on social media on Bigger Bolder at Bigger Bolder Baking we have so much lined up for the holiday season it's insane and I want you guys to be well equipped to sail through the holidays so you have amazing food and have great time with your friends and family thank you so much for tuning into my live and I'll see you back here again really soon