Weddingbee Blog

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 wedding.
• 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).