Weddingbee Blog

Let me just say that I love cupcakes. I love cake. I love dessert in all its incarnations. But there comes a point when I’m eating a cupcake or cake that the icing is just too much for me, and I have to scrape it off and make an ugly, sticky little pile on the side of my plate. Last year, when I told Cinnamon Buns to pick any cake he wanted from my plethora of baking books and I would make it for his birthday…he asked if I could make a sour cherry pie. It’s just who we are.

So naturally, one of the first things we decided about our wedding (before we’d even decided on getting married in 2011 or 2012!) was that we were going to have wedding pie—more specifically, a pie buffet, full of all our favourite flavours of pie, with not a dollop of icing in sight. Then I started buying Martha Stewart Weddings, and my 20-wedding-blogs-a-day habit began, and I found that wedding pie was a bit of a trend. No matter, it’s still what we wanted!

Picture from Once Wed

Pie with toppers and initials from Ruffled

The funny thing is, I kinda want to make a wedding cake. One of my favourite eye-candy baking books is Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes. There are a few wedding cake recipes in the back that just sound delicious. I’ve made some cakes from this book in the past, and cakes from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. My aversion to icing does not extend to making it, and spending a day elbow-deep in sugar, butter, and flour is one of my favourite things to do.

(All personal photos): Sweet and Salty Cake (Baked), S’more Cupcakes, Gingerbread Cake with Instant Fudge Frosting (2 Sky High recipes), Lemon-Blueberry cake (Sky High)

Note that if you are always the one to volunteer to bring dessert to potlucks, or make people birthday cak, you should invest in a Cupcake Courier. I love mine, and it wasn’t as frivolous of a purchase as it sounds!

So, I like making cakes, but prefer eating pie. While pie isn’t such a feat of engineering as a layered cake is (check out the structural unintegrity of the lemon cake!) it is still a lot of fun, as long as I have my food processor. And fresh fruit is just so yummy, and almost makes me feel like dessert is good for me!

Cinnamon Buns’ birthday pies.

So, I won’t get to make my own wedding cake, because we’re having pie. But couldn’t I make our wedding pies? Of course I can! The plan is to start making the pies in about April or May, and stick them in the freezer before they are baked. Then the day before the wedding I will have to spend a few hours (3-4 I’m estimating) in the kitchen systematically baking the pies two by two. I could fit 4 in the oven, but that means 2 on top of 2 and I don’t want to risk the top row of pies bubbling over into the bottom row.

People look at me like I’m nuts when I say I’m making our wedding desserts, but pie does freeze well, so I’m confident. I bought a lot of fruit this summer, so our freezer is already stuffed with tasty, in-season fruit for filling. I also made some peach pie filling and canned it…I’m a little unsure about those. I’m confident in my jam-making skills but I’m a little worried to serve people the peach pie filling, so I might just have to buy imported peaches in May.

We even made a list of pie flavours!

Two each:

• Strawberry-Rhubarb
• Blueberry
• Apple
• Peach
• Cherry
• Saskatoon Berry
• Blackberry-Apple

And one pumpkin pie.

We’ve estimated 60 people x 2 slices each / 8 pieces in a pie = 15 pies.

The pumpkin pie is the only one I can’t make weeks in advance and freeze, but I can make and freeze the pastry to take some of the work out of the day before the wedding. I’m going to make a pie and stick it in the freezer sometime soon, then bake it a month later, just to test the pie-freezing theory.

Image from Wisekitchen

We will do a ‘pie-cutting’, and we’ve decided that our pie will have our initials on the crust, and the flavour will be strawberry-rhubarb, king of all pie flavours.

There are tons more fun little things that go with a pie buffet, like handmade signs indicating flavours, collecting cake-stands, and finding fun pie servers.

I think any dessert can be made “wedding-worthy”! What’s your favourite dessert?