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

for 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 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 um 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 um so for those of you who want to check the pile of 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 tuning in to my live it is it is a little busy here in this household today we've got a little bit of a baby and who's having his breakfast and is not too happy but we're going to power off and 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 pipeline 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 and please just buy good quality pie crust when you can it just makes a big big difference high crust is really really easy to make and i've got a video on uh youtube about how you can make that's really really easy and any questions that you have any comments any queries that you have please ask them in the comments and zack will be able to get me the will you sack yeah yeah and so ask any questions that you have and uh you know because it's baking season it's november they're um 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 um any 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 8 30 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 um yes always i use all butter i think baby are you referring to all butter and some i would say butter and lard i i don't use lard or crisco like pie crust some people do and they swear by it i've never done it and you know i know a lot of like big bakeries who do use um like crisco or lard in their pie crust 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 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 um the steam rises from the butter it evaporates and it rises up your pie crust when you think of puff pastry croissands all those kind of things rough puff pastry you need and a hard cold butter to do that martering is not going to do the same thing so um just keep that in mind okie dokie i'm going to roll out a pie crust just roll it out too like bigger than your pie pan i have a pie pan here there are these are nine 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 silicone mat here i find this really useful but just do it on your countertop and don't be afraid to use flour when you're rolling out your pie crust usually i would say go easy on the flower but um 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 someone had a question how do i make a vegan pie crust a [Music] i don't know the answer to that question we have a vegan pie crust on bigger bolder baking but it's i'm sorry a a cookie a crust but it's not really a pie crust i let me think about that and try and get back to you let me think about that and 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 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 um but when i need them they're really important so what i want you to do is just pick a seasonal fall-ish um 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 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 one for 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 um 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 to the pie business i'm in the wrong business and make your own pies it's really easy it's not that expensive and it shouldn't cost you 40 dollars to buy a pumpkin pie and they're all the same if you ask me they're all the same if you cut out a few like this any more pie questions zack um yeah i'm making a pie do you use butter to stick the basket um designing lines that's kind of yeah yeah you know you use egg wash use egg wash to stick to stick which flour should they use when rolling 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 um 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 that one's not as big of a deal good question though um 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 l.a so i'm trying to think of what pies i'm doing i am 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 um i don't know if we need a traditional p uh pumpkin pie uh i got a question from facebook from barb how do you choose which type of pie crust goes with a certain pie oh that's a really good question barb that's a really good question um certain pie crusts are only used for certain things um pate sucra is a pipe it's not really a pipe 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 um short crust pie crust also known as um like a 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 brazil 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 [Music] puff pastry not not pie crust that is not that's not what's supposed to be used for pie crust so stay away from that rough puff pastry you can use this 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 i would have said no to that but um 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 where 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 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 like are people worried are afraid of pie making pastry pastry is a really really easy thing to make it's 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 um just make it and put 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 like wednesday before thanksgiving look at that i am 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 and do a little bit of egg wash around your rim and then your pastry will like adhere to it really well so here's what i'm going to do i don't have oh sugar i forgot my pastry my egg wash okay i'll do a little bit of water just for this sake got my pastry brush do egg wash and for this part because egg wash also will help it stick but it will also make your pie crust nice and golden brown and shiny and if you don't wash your egg your pastry with pie crust it can be a little bit dull looking so do you do a pastry sorry i do with egg wash it's too early in the morning for me um see 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 sack 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 um someone asked my pie crusts always shrink that's from jane hall on facebook 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 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 and it was only until like 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 place 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 and then there's other things like just the making of the dough and over handling of the dough that's important i would say when you're making pie crusts a really really easy way to make pie crusts 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 like fluffy layered pastry you get like small amounts of butter all the way throughout because the blade in your food processor strongly strongly recommend making pastry on a food processor so there you go look at that you see that zach see super easy so like i didn't have a all i had to make this pie was this excuse me one little leaf cutter that'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 wash 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 up the night before do this on uh the night before you're having guests over if it's like 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 put it back so i went too far yeah 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 a video step by step uh sorry videos oh sorry i don't have videos i've got photos of each pie design and instructions of how to do want to you it sure and thank you everybody for tuning in uh 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 showstopping pie to the table on thanksgiving day so there we go we did that little one there you call that as well as a cut out pie crust i'm not quite sure um one quick question before you move on how long can you keep the pie crust in the refrigerator so let me show you make your pie crust these are made ahead of time and you can keep it if you make it put in the fridge 24 hours don't keep it longer 24 hours i'll tell you why it starts to go gray the flower starts to turn 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 um make it make it now get it out of the way pop it into your freezer it makes life so much easier and it rolls out perfectly it bakes perfectly like freezing pastry is the best way to go okie dokie let's do a lattice because that's a little bit harder and i want to make sure that i fit that in someone asked what's your opinion on laminating jonathan um you know i don't for those of you who know bigger bolder baking and know me i don't really i don't uh i'm not an expert on laminating doughs and i generally try and do the like quick easy step like i i fold it i grate in frozen butter into my pie crust and to give you that lovely flaky effect but i don't generally laminate those it's a really good idea for for those of you who have the like headspace to be able to like laminate those go back and forth have the time and it does make a difference it really does however i still get really good results without laminating those i don't i don't know if i i don't know if it's a patient's 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 here we go so roll out your pie crust try and get it to kind of like almost like a rectangle rather than a round and we are going to take a pizza cutter you can use a knife piece because they're just really easy and we are going to cut out big thick lashes we're not going to do skinny ones we're going to do big ones oh look at that that's hilarious um okay then let's see nice big thick lashes and you want to ask a wood rolling pin or metal ones what's your opinion on metal ones that's from pam white um tradition so i don't really have an opinion that's 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 i just it's what i grew up with what my mom had in the actually my mom had a a a plastic one now that i think of it but i just this is just always what i use so it's what you have in kitchens um i don't generally use metal i don't know why it's just i think it's just one of those things of what you're used to and what are the benefits or are there any pros or cons i'm actually not 100 sure and 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 lashes here nice and thick let me see how thick they are so just some lines they're around so daisy around two inches thick i made these nice and thick because uh it just kind of 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 lashes is really really easy to recreate it looks complicated because it's woven but it's really not that hard um let me see i'm going to roll out i'm going to let me see i'm going to do this while i do i'll do this first so you lift up two of your lashes 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 is that can you see that okay pull it back and 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 [Music] just to get that last those last two lash those pieces of lattice someone asked what pastry mat are you using that's from maureen burns 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 um on it so you can roll out you don't have to like check or whatever it has everything that you need on it so i find it really useful and 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 tyler jacobson what's up jen hi tyler not much just making pies okey dokey so i'm gonna do another strip here someone asked if you were dashing through the snow earlier was i is that possible i tell you what i was listening to christmas music earlier um when we were doing uh when we were doing our test i was just singing elmo with george but um 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 literally started listening to it too late and i just i i didn't see enough home alone i didn't see like i only saw uh national lampoon's christmas vacation like 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 always goes by so fast someone asked are you going to make pie crust cookies is that a thing it is a thing yeah it's i don't know if it's really a thing thing but um you put it in little jars lids of jars and then you like do your pie crust you do your filling and then you do a little lattice on top and stuff okey-dokey so can you see that sack there so i don't know i hope you could see the folding back and forth what i was doing it's really easy you just lay a few pieces down i laid down three lift one of them up uh lay a piece on top put it down lift the other two up lay a piece on top bring and you go back and forth between the one and the two or if you're doing five two and three whatever it is um but if you see if you do it nice and thick like this really big you just get this kind of like really like i don't know it's just there's something you can't see the pie filling but there's something really satisfying and like professional looking about this that it just looks like really good but that's a lattice 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 we do next zach um someone has a question but i don't know if i can pronounce it so don't laugh at me uh cherry rice asked what's the difference between a pate sakri and a pate brissy that's very very good uh sucra or you said this that was right uh braze the difference is quantities is um we we we have this discussion here recently um in the house because we made a pate brazil for the website and i had to look up i and then we were having this conversation of aren't they both very similar but they're different pata sucra is that's 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 pate sucra pate brise 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 it a pie out of it so i was surprised by that and the difference i want to say is quantities and a little bit of sugar i think a little bit of sugar i think is is a little bit of difference but they are very similar but generally pate sucre is not used for pie crust pate brisay can be um real quick we had juan carlos verganza asked uh gemma what is the thanksgiving bake-a-thon you want to talk about oh yeah yeah yeah that's great thanks juan and so the bakeathon is coming this saturday it is um 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 lineup this year is insane we have um some top chefs from all around the us even actually we have um even outside of the us we have duff goldman and we have joanne chang brian hart hoffman we have um oh my gosh my head tamara mary uh we have bill who was the the um chef from the white house there are so many people and in the lineup it's going to be alive on saturday it is going to be cooking segments 1 pm 1 p.m 1 p.m pacific live on oh eastern sorry 10 pacific 1 eastern live on saturday and we're going to be doing cooking segments we're going to be doing um like every this is all baking so all your desserts questions or your pies your whatever it is there's going to be make-ahead desserts there's going to be 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 and dominic ansel is a part of it which is very exciting and he's going to be making like this croissant stuffing which i i've never heard of before but it sounds insane and so a really amazing lineup of talented people and tune in live and and uh yeah so no kid hungry you can go over to nokia hungry.com find out the information there but go to my social media biggerbolderbaking.com and my instagram today and uh you can find all that information there also look at my stories but that's very exciting i hope that you know we try and raise money for no kid hungry we have some amazing um donors this year and it's it's really great because last year we did it and it was it was fantastic and we had we had such a small group of people it was the first time that we did it and this year we just blew it out so i want to say thank you to kevin because kevin is really the organizer behind all of this with no kid hungry and uh 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 zack what'll i do next i'll do i do i'll do cherry here's what we're going to do a little bit of flour let me check the time next one we're going to take a pie crust and we are going to this is a really fun one you no matter what your pie is spell out the pie the filling the flavor 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 just directions of how you can also recreate these just looking at the photos on my website it gives you a really good visual of like how to do this okie dokie so now here i have a cherry pie let me should roll this out a little bit more i have some cookie cutters i'll 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 um for special occasions things like that here's what i'm going to do this is not 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 the letters on top of the pie so i'll do a few seeds you can do this with pecan you can do it with chocolate apple really really easy make sure that your cutters are not too small because you want to be able to see the what it spells out um but yeah like you can do this with any type of pie pumpkin pie pecan pie even though you don't usually put pastry on top cherry will do a little few h's 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 uh make make different types of pies you know like pecan and bourbon pie that sounds good i had a lot of people asking about pecan pie and tips with uh pecan pie some people say it was like getting a little grainy some people say it kind of like oozes out give me general tips about the compost you know it's a it's that's a really it's a good point it can ooze out i'll tell you when it doesn't ooze out when uh lots of times maybe when you get store-bought pecan pies it's you made with corn syrup um so i make my pecan pie with maple syrup so kind of like a more pure sugar and but it can it can ooze out a little bit if you're looking for like that kind of thick uh center i think people use dark corn syrup which i normally wouldn't gravitate towards golden syrup is another really good substitute so if you and you can buy golden syrup on amazon golden syrup in replace of the maple syrup and that will give you like a thick for what better word a gelatinous kind of slice of pecan pie and that works really really well the maple one maple syrup do it because it's 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 well that's a good question let me see let's move on to ease okay someone asked uh you've talked about this before and i know you have a post about this do you use ceramic pie plates versus old-fashioned metal ones any difference in time of cooking in different pans i love your videos keep them coming that's from tracy on facebook thank you tracy um tracy on facebook yes i do so i use all i use all different types because i have all different types do i have 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 and because just because of the wall because of the material you you know it's the thinner wall in your 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 um so if you're looking if if it's something that's like maybe uh has a wetter feeling like an apple pie or something that's a really good option so you get your your pie crust nice and crispy um someone said you know you're a pro when you can keep your black shirt clean ain't that the truth yeah it's not my first rodeo and thank you for that i appreciate it um 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 um so it 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 someone asked a good question do you put your pies directly on the oven rack or do you put them on a sheet oh that's a good question there's a few reasons why you would do the main reasons sheet pan will will will um will get preheated so but we will sorry excuse me that's what 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 um 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 uh put put a bit of like tin foil or parchment on there and then just clean it off easy okay i've 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 a little bit small but pick bigger cutters so you get bigger numbers and sorry not numbers letters we're getting over a cold here in this house so my brain is still a little bit foggy cherry um but yeah so keep an eye on my website because we have new recipes going up every day and i've new pie crusts with pie tips i have a guide make a head 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 uh ways to get organized i spelled cherry wrong i spelt it c-h-e-e-y cherry c-h-e-r-r-y there we go i'm gonna show i gotta show i'm there you go perfect so my letters might be a little bit small make them a little bit bigger and put it 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 oh here's a quick question how long can you keep fruit pie before it goes bad after baking it i'm guessing so um after baking it i'd say like three days three days um that's long enough um and if you want anything to last longer keep it in the fridge that's just it you'll get a day or two longer out of it if you keep it in the fridge someone asked where did you find those letter colors i found these on amazon and i'm going to be doing the on amazon live after this and um i'm going to i have the product features there so if you want to join me on amazon live after and i have all these products so there you go cherry did i spell it right again um okay so that one's going to 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 at my website we did we did a cherry one there too and it'll 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 one 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 um i got a perfect question for you real quick someone asked is there a true difference between using regular butter european butter or kerrygold butter yeah kerrygold's the best that's the difference um 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 and 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 our climate gives us this lovely butter uh 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 um which is very exciting and like all day long i would say kerry gold it's expensive though you know it's it's it's pricier than other butter i will tell you though that in california um pound for pound kerry gold is not i buy it at costco is not more not that much more expensive than a californian butter so i generally go for a 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 it okay i'm going to do the geometric one now this is a pretty like gnarly looking one and 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 in to my live excuse me yeah sorry we all came down with the cold in this house um thank you for tuning in for my live i'm gemma stafford today we are talking about pie design um 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 there's a lot of talking going on this week and um yeah so we're talking about pi 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 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 gonna make a pretty incredible design on top of our pie um 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 uh 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 it put it into the fridge to defrost next day pop it into the oven that's all your dessert work done really simple okey dokey 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 let me 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 going to 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 i'm going to tilt it up real quick so can you see like yeah so people see kind of so you layer strips on top of each other and you lay them um 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 up so daisy 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 going to just roll these out a little bit longer almost there and someone asked on facebook this is ella hope on facebook could you use buckwheat flour instead of regular flour when you're making a gluten-free pie crust you know buckwheat flour can be a little bit finicky i would say air 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 um zero sorry sorry one-to-one 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 here we go and we're almost done last piece so 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 biggerbolderbaking.com and i have pictures of how you can do it there 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 uh myrtle on facebook asks are different decoration designs more appropriate for different fillings like does some filling need to be more covered in order 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 cut outs 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 p peach filling in here um 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 um 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 just 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 um 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 cut out design like that we did cherries we only 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 uh 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 in to my live i really appreciate it if you haven't had enough of me yet i want to see more pie design i'm going to be going over to amazon live now at 10 30 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 and join me over there always keep a very close eye on biggerbolderbaking.com follow me on social media on biggerbolder at biggerbolderbaking we have so much lined up for the holiday season it's insane and um 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 in to my live and i'll see you back here again really soon