I wanted to make a special pie for my amazing boyfriend, Matt, on his birthday a month ago. Naturally, I decided to make an apple pie because he likes apple pie and because I can make a mean apple pie with fresh ground cinnamon and a small amount of pre-cooking the apples on the stove. But that's a recipe for another post.
What really made this pie special was a new idea I tried for shaping the upper crust - cookie cutters. I rolled the pie crust as thin as I normally would for an upper crust, about 1/4-inch thick, before cutting and imprinting it with dinosaur cookie cutters with stamps of their bones.
Rolling it out as thin as usual meant that the imprints made that part of the dough thinner than I ever would making a stamped cookie. I don't really have any evidence that this made the final product have clearer detailing, but I do believe that by not thickening the pre-cut, pre-stamped crust, the crust expanded less than than it would have with a thicker crust and kept the outlines of the dinosaurs clearer. Brushing with cream also probably helped define the design by helping to brown the crust.
I look forward to maybe making a Star Wars themed pie in the future - maybe a Darth Vader blackberry pie?