Lots of people (including my own mother) thought I was insane for wanting to make all the pies for our wedding. I am so glad I stuck to my guns, because hive? The pie tasted awesome. People kept coming up to me and saying it was delicious (although, I suppose, who would tell the bride on her wedding day that she made sub-par pie? Hmmm…) and wedding pie was such a great idea. I have to admit that it was nice to receive all those compliments, and it felt like a little bit of vindication after all the doubters. I thought it was delicious, and I even managed to have two slices!

(this is the first guest photo of the pie table to surface!)

This is the part where I give you the recipes I used!

I used the Fool-proof Pie Dough recipe from Cooks Illustrated, via Smitten Kitchen, but I didn’t make it exactly the same way. Here’s my version of the recipe, but I’d suggest testing it as-written the first time though. Remember that the adjustments are what work for me, in a very dry climate at 3438 feet above sea level. (Altitude absolutely affects your baking!) I also used my food processor, as I am a lazy bones.

Foolproof Pie Dough
Cooks Illustrated, November 2007

Makes enough for one 9-inch double-crust pie

2 1/2 cups (12 1/2 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/4 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch slices (the original recipe has you use a mix of butter and shortening – I just like butter better)
1/4 cup cold vodka
1/3 cup cold water (the original recipe had 1/4 cup cold water)

1. Process the flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined. Add butter and process until homogeneous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 15 seconds (dough will resemble cottage cheese curds and there should be no uncoated flour). Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade.

2. Pour water into food processor, then once the food processor is running, pour the vodka in a thin stream through the feeder spout. Stop processor and scrape down the sides as needed. Pastry is ready the moment it all clumps into one big ball and threatens to pop the lid off (although that last bit might just be because the latch on my processor is broken!) Divide dough into two even balls and flatten each into a disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days.

Fillings

Below are the sources for all the pie fillings I made. I doubled most, as I was making two pies of each flavour, but found both the apple and the apple-blackberry much too generous. I used 7 – 8 apples per double batch of filling. I was generally aiming for 4-5 cups of filling per pie, because I didn’t want pies with enormous domes. Giant pies like that also tend to bubble and spill more in the baking. I also took care that each recipe included some tapioca or cornstarch, so the pies would be non-drippy.

Apple | Apple-blackberry | Blueberry | Saskatoonberry/Serviceberry | Strawberry-Rhubarb | Mum’s Chocolate Tarts

The cherry pie filling I made up with a vague recipe from my mum. I bought four of these jars of sour cherries:

Drained three of them and put the cherries in a big saucepan, and poured the whole other jar (syrup and all) over them. I mixed in some cornstarch (about 3 tablespoons) and some sugar until it tasted like I wanted it to (about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup, I think) and let it bubble and get a bit thick. Remember that things will also always be thicker when they’re cool too.

For the chocolate tarts, mum came over to my house on Thursday and baked the crusts, then did the filling on Friday while we were waiting for fruit pies to bake. It’s a simple but delicious recipe.

Cooking pies from frozen:

We did 6 pies at a time in Cinnamon Buns’ mum’s convection oven, so we only got two tries to perfect this art. I don’t recommend using both oven racks unless you have a convection oven though – the baking will be too uneven. Even with the convection oven we switched the pies around from top to bottom halfway through. We started out cooking them at 350 and that took a long time, and we ended up turning the oven up to 400 near the end. The tops were brown by the halfway point, but the filling was still room temperature. What we did the second time was start the pies at 400, with the tops loosely covered in tinfoil, then when we switched them around (top rack pies to the bottom, bottom rack pies to the top) we took off the foil and turned the oven down a bit, back to 350.

We weren’t serving these hot (obviously, as we baked them on Friday, and served them on Saturday) but we still wanted the fillings to get bubbly hot, so the cornstarch and tapioca could do their jobs. The test pie I did a week or two before the wedding got cooked at 350 for an hour, and while the pastry was done, and it wasn’t cold per se, the tapioca was still visible as little white dots everywhere. If it is hard to see, stick a metal knife into the pie through one of the slits in the top, and hold it there for 10-15 seconds. Then take it out and touch it to see if it is hot. If it hurts, your filling is hot. You can also just wait until you see filling bubbling through the slits too.

Bridal injuries:

Beware when moving pies from one rack to the other! As we were fitting 3 pies on to each rack, some pies had to be pushed to the back of the bottom rack, and I (inevitably) touched my wrist to the top rack accidentally. After that mum took over the job of transferring pies, and also pointed out that I could have pulled out the bottom rack, placed the pies, then pushed it back in. Oops. Luckily it wasn’t a bad burn, or very large, and I wore a bracelet on that wrist which helped camouflage it on the wedding day.

What’s your wedding dessert? What’s your favourite flavour of pie?

Interested in the logistics of making your own pie for your wedding? I’m going to try to articulate everything we discovered about the logistics of it in this post, and share the recipes in the next one.

Preparation:

• The best way (in my opinion) to do pies for your own wedding is to make (but not bake) them ahead of time, and then spend a few hours the day before shoveling pies in and out of the oven. This means that you have to be able to store whatever number of frozen pies (we did 12), which leads me to:
• Think about your freezer space! We briefly considered buying a small chest freezer, but don’t actually have anywhere to put one. We ended up making a couple trips to Cinnamon Buns’ mum’s house to fill up the freezer in her garage with our pies.
• Think about your oven space! I thought we could get 3 in our oven on the top rack, in a little triangle. Turns out, only 2 fit, and I didn’t want to layer due to uneven baking.
• Do you know anyone with a large or efficient oven? Cinnamon Buns’ mum has a convection oven, which meant that we could layer the pies because the heating is more even. That meant we could cook 6 pies in her oven at one time, so we borrowed her oven on the Friday morning before the wedding.
• Now that you know how many you can bake at once, how long will it take? Baking a full pie from frozen takes about an hour and a half. How many loads of pies do you need to do?
• Stock up on butter. And sugar. And flour.
• Ditto on tinfoil pie plates. I thought they’d be more practical for freezing/heating, I didn’t want to be scared that glass would crack. Plus, we did 12! That’s a lot of pie plates to have leftover.
• If you’ve made this decision far enough ahead of time, buy fruit in season and freeze it! Then you’re not trying to buy blueberries in May – that’s just unnatural. (In this part of the world at least.)

The Making:

• I love a production line, so I would make batch of pastry after pastry after pastry. My food processor could only hold enough flour/butter for one 9″ pie at a time, so I would just do 4 or 5 batches in a row. I didn’t bother cleaning out the food processor between batches like that, because I was just going to dump more butter and flour into it in a minute. Just a quick scrape with a spatula to get the last few bits of pastry out was enough.
• You need to let pastry rest in the fridge, but if it rests too long it’ll be too hard to roll when you take it out, then you have to wait for it to warm up a bit. I found an hour to an hour and a half in the fridge was just the right amount.
• Think about guests in pretty outfits, and you in a white dress. You don’t want extra-juicy pie, so I made sure all the filling recipes I used included tapioca or cornstarch. I like juicy pies at home, but I didn’t want drippy fillings at the weddding.
• If you don’t have a standby pastry recipe already, try a single batch of the recipe you’re planning first. Then you can adjust ingredients or choose a whole new recipe as needed.
• Think about how you’re decorating your crusts. If you have many flavours, you might want to have different crusts to tell them apart.

I know for a fact that these ones are blueberry pies, the first picture in the post is a Saskatoonberry/serviceberry pie, and the one with the tiled hearts is apple.

The Storing/Transporting:

• Fruit pies don’t need to be refrigerated overnight. Custard pies on the other hand, do. If you’re concerned about fridge space, go with fruit pies!
• To transport them, we used a shallow cardboard box for each pie, and then put those boxes in big rubbermaid containers. Don’t close the boxes until the pies are completely cool! Otherwise they’ll steam themselves inside the box and get all soggy.
• My original plan was to set everything, including the pies, on the pie table the night before, and cover the pies with tinfoil tents or tea towels to keep flies off. It was my very smart mother who pointed out that old buildings tend to have little mice-y tenants that like tasty food left out on tables. Hm… I’d forgotten about unwanted pets. So, we left them in their boxes.

The first 6 pies (strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry, sour cherry) and 2 chocolate tarts almost ready to go!

The Display:

• We spent 12 months stocking up on cake/pie plates, and ended up with more than we needed, but better more than too few!
• To get the pies where I wanted, once all the cake plates were set up in a pleasing display on Friday, I put a sealed pie in a box on each stand, and left instructions for our day-of-coordinator to take the pies out of the boxes before guests came in.
• Make signs for each flavour of pie. I woke up at 4am on my wedding day with the thought of ‘I never made flavour signs!!’. Then I decided there was nothing I could do about it, and went back to sleep. I had been thinking of making a little tent card for each pie, but once Cinnamon Buns and I had cut the wedding pie, the caterers ended up cutting and plating a whole bunch of pieces of pie so people could just walk up and grab a plate. Had I known that was going to happen (and had I actually remembered to make signs) I probably would have just done a list of what flavours there were in an 8×10 frame or something. It didn’t work out too badly, because once the pies were all cut like that, you could see what was in them.

The Amounts:

• I made 12 fruit pies, 2 each of 6 flavours. My mum made 2 chocolate tarts, so we had a total of 14 pies. Our math ran like this:

60 guests + 5 people working = 65 people. Many flavours means people will try multiple pies, so let’s average 2 slices per person. 65 people X 2 pieces each = 130 slices, which is probably a generous estimate.

If each fruit pie is sliced into 8 slices, that’s 96 slices. The chocolate tarts could be sliced into 12 slices each, that’s 24 which = 120 slices of various pies.

Here’s the answer to the question that everyone is asking: how much was left over?

Sunday, when we went back to clean up, there were 5 boxes left with pie in them. Two boxes had whole, untouched pies (a Saskatoonberry, and a blackberry-apple) and the other three boxes had slices of various flavours in them, which probably comprised 2.5 total pies. We took them back to our house, and at our Sunday British-relatives’ dinner, the three boxes of slices were polished off. The whole blackberry-apple we took into work on Monday as a thank you for a very touching card they sent. That means that the two of us just have to polish off the Saskatoonberry pie, and the wedding pie is done with! I think the amounts were just right. Also remember, if you’re using this as a planning guide for your wedding, that we had a ‘heavy appetizer’ or ‘tapas-style’ dinner, rather than a full plated meal.

Does this post make making pie for your wedding seem feasible? I hope so, because I had fun doing it, and wouldn’t change a thing! (Apart from maybe actually getting these done a month before, instead of a week or two).