Harvest Pies: Hand-Cut Leaf Pie Designs & Pie Dough Recipe

Learn how to make hand-cut leaf pie designs inspired from Fall leaves. Our harvest pie crust designs are super fun. And delicious. 

Pie season is a year round event, but there’s something very special about fall and winter pies. The warm and comfort of making pies for all our holiday tables and gatherings inspires us to be creative. We’ve been wanting to share how we make these harvest pie designs with you all so you can see why we spend a little more time when crafting each Thanksgiving and holiday pie. Like we’ve mentioned before Autumn is one of our favorite times of year and our search for all the leaves changing color is a yearly event. We’re taking our love of Autumn leaves to our obsession with pies. It’s a great thing, this combo love of leaves and pie. Let’s dive in.

Video: Holiday Hand-Cut Leaf Pie Design: 

Learning how to make leaf pie designs is so easy and all it takes is a great pie dough recipe, a batch of your favorite filling and some creativity. The creativity part is carving out leaves in all shapes and sizes and laying them out that look beautiful to you. That’s really it. Only thing to keep in mind is that as you pile on the pie dough leaves in layers, the more baking time you’ll need to make sure the leaf crusts cook through.

The more leaves you add, the more pie crust you’ll get. So you can decide how many leaves you want to eat!

 

How To Make Hand-Cut Leaf Pie Designs Tutorial:

Our first pie was a large leaf pie design. If it’s your first time, start with larger leaves. It’s easier. Start by laying the base pie bottom dough, then crimp the sides.

Using a small paring knife, start by carving out the shape of leaves. Maximize your pie dough by cutting out the leaves as close to each other as possible.

Gently peel away the excess dough. You can save the dough and roll out again to make more leaves.

score the center of the dough leaves to create the leaf center-stems

score the edges of the dough to create the leaf textures on the edges

lay the leaves across the pie

almost ready to bake

brush the dough with egg wash

finished large leaf pie design and it’s all hand-cut!

For our second pie, we made a double crust design apple pie. Lay the base dough layer then pinch off the excess edges.

use the back of a fork to press into the dough and make a textured design

pierce air holes in the dough to help during baking

have fun and be creative with different designs

lay dough on pie, press on the edges of the pie and remove excess dough

make smaller leaves and lay them around the edges of the pie

ready to share

For the next pie we made different leaf shapes, maple leaves, & laid them around the edges

this pie was voted a favorite by friends and family

for the last pie, we made a whole wheat pumpkin pie

not your regular pumpkin pie

There you have it friends, some inspiration to making your next pie extra, super-duper special. Hope you enjoyed out tutorial on how to make leaf pie designs and go crazy in the kitchen this Holiday season!

Have fun and let us know how your pies turn out!

hugs,

diane and todd

Many of you on our social media community asked about using leaf cookie cutters instead of cutting them free-hand. Sure, leaf shaped cookie cutters can work great too. Here’s some online products we found and if you purchase them through these amazon affiliate links, we’ll receive a few cents of commission. Thanks!

Fox Run pie decorating kit has some cute cutters beyond the leaves including acorns, holiday trees and other cut-outs to take you outside the holiday design.

Love the little apple cut-outs. How about a special pie decorated with apple crusts for Teacher Day? Teachers would love it.

 

NY Cake Leaves set has 4 gorgeous leave designs. That should be plenty of options to create a plethora of creative pies.

These leaf cut-outs look very Fall and Autumn inspired as well, so they’ll be perfect for Thanksgiving and the holiday season. The pink leaf cut-out looks universal enough to even look great outside of the holidays.

 

 

R & M International has the leaves, especially a beautiful oak leaf, that you’re looking for. But they also have a cut pumpkin cut-out, which is perfect for Halloween.

Included in the collection are Turkey cut-outs, which could be a nice mix with your leaves for your Thanksgiving pies.

 

 

Nordic Ware has these easy-to-make reversible pie crusts. They look perfect for those who like to have more crust on their pie. Simple and elegant.

The apple and leaf designs are perfect for Autumn and Fall inspired pies.

 

 

Wilton’s simple yet useful cut-out have the basic but beautiful leaf set. The maple leaf is gorgeous and when spread across a pie can be stunning.

When using these, make sure to still use our technique of scoring the middle and edges of the leaf crusts to give texture and more shape. Love these ones!

This recipe and tutorial was originally published in 2015 and re-published in 2019 with updated video.