Very nice!
I hardly ever make pies, but here’s a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie from a couple years ago.
I love it! And I could do that… with a press to make the leaf. What did you use for the red spheres?
(I sometimes put hand-cut simple leaves around the outside of a pie like that, but I like the look of the maple leaves. I might try to make a cutter for a maple or oak leaf and give that a try.)
The red spheres are sugared cranberries - cranberries boiled in sugar syrup for less than a minute, then rolled in superfine sugar. For the leaves (which were of course baked separately) I used the tip of a knife (maybe a toothpick as well?) to draw on the leaf veins, and an egg wash before baking. No cookie press needed. The leaves along the outer edge of the pan come out darker, so it’s a nice color variation.
Did you cut them freehand? I have made leaves, and I’ve drawn the veins with the tip of my knife. But I wouldn’t want to cut that many maple-leaves. Even cutting a lot of simple “laurel” leaves is kind of tedious.
Definitely not freehand! It was from a set of leaves similar to one of these:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/R-M-International-1936-Maple-Leaf-Cookie-Cutters-Assorted-Sizes-5-Piece-Set/271506897
https://www.walmart.com/ip/R-M-International-5152-Autumn-Cookie-Cutters-Maple-Leaf-Turkey-Oak-Leaf-3-Piece-Set/268718719?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=101017809
Here’s one with many leaves:
I tend not to roll out shortcrust dough into a sheet for lining dishes. As soon as the dough comes together from being breadcrumb stage, I quickly roll it into a thick sausage, and then rest in the fridge for a couple hours. While still cold, I cut it into disks of ~5 mm thickness, and use those to line the dish, just pressing those together to cover the gaps. This really saves overworking the dough, I think. Top crusts are another matter, but I make open tarts way more than I do covered ones.
It wouldn’t work for cutting shapes, but I sometimes use actual leaves as stencils and dust powdered sugar around them to decorate a flourless chocolate cake. Through most of fall and early winter I have a nice collection of those in my back yard. 
Per Stella Parks, critical butter temperature is 73F, with a goal of keeping pie dough between 65F and 70F
Thanks! That’s great info.
Right now, the counter I use to roll out pie crust is 71. The flour is also 71. The rolling pin is 69, and the sheet I use to roll out the crust is 68.
I just want to say thanks again. That link is really helpful, and explains clearly why my cook book instructs you to keep pausing to pop the crust into the fridge, whereas every time I chill the dough it just becomes hard to work with. It’s only a few degrees of difference. But at times of year when i make pie, my dough IS typically between 65 and 70, and i can see that in many ordinary kitchens it would be above 73.
Also… Flour hold temp longer than i would have expected. I’ve been storing extra flour in the freezer lately. And if my husband empties a sack from the freezer into the flour bin in the morning, it still feels cold when i scoop it out hours later.
I would eat all of those pies!
Prior to having a child I enjoyed making pie. If the kitchen was warm I would put ice on a cookie sheet and rest it on the counter where I was working. It did pretty well at keeping the crust cool.
A general note about baking: My kitchen is always too warm for pie crust and too cold for bread! Double the size in 2 hours?? HA! At least twice that. I took to putting a pan of hot water in the oven and raising (rising?) the bread there.
I’m sure you are all waiting on pins and needles for the results of my experiment.
I made two small pies today. I usually make a single deep dish pie at a time. I didn’t want to make a ton more pie than usual, but did want to check the value of resting the dough.
So, right after breakfast, I made dough for one pair of crusts, and put it in the fridge. I measured temps at the time. The kitchen air was 69F, the flour and the countertop were 70F, and after I cut in the cold butter and added ice water, the ball of dough was 58F.
Then I did other stuff around the house, and started the second pair of crusts. Maybe 3 hours later?
Air temp in the kitchen was now 67, and the flour and countertop were down to 69. I mixed and cut the dough for the second pair of crusts.
Then I took the chilled disks from the fridge and placed them (separately) on the countertop to give them a bit of a chance to warm up. Then I started all the other stuff. So I only gave them as much time to defrost as would be natural if I had only made the one pie.
I opened the bag of defrosted berries, added some sugar and tapioca, stirred it up. I dug my pie plates out, turned on the oven to pre-heat, cleaned the countertop and covered it with a silpat, fished out the rolling pin. Stirred the filling some more…
And then I rolled out the two bottom crusts, and trimmed them. I filled them both with berry mixture. Rolled out the two top crusts and laid them over the pies. I trimmed and sealed each as I did it. And then I placed them in the 450F oven.
Then I cleaned up the mess, and cut the bits of extra dough and laid them on a baking tray, and sprinkled them with sugar and powdered cinnamon. After I turned down the heat to 350, I slid the extra bits of crust in the oven. Everything came out when it was done – the extra crust just barely before the pies, which was odd to me. But I guess little pies cook a lot faster than deep dish pies.
We haven’t eaten the pies, yet, as they need to cool. That will be after supper. But I nibbled the crust-cookies, and gave my daughter a blind taste test.
Rested dough produced slightly flakier cookies, with slightly crispier flakes. The unrested dough was also flaky – lovely visible flakes, but the flakes are a little softer, so it doesn’t feel quite as flaky in the mouth. The rested dough also “puffed up” a bit more. The flavor, unsurprisingly, was the same.
I asked my daughter which she preferred. She said the preferred the rested dough (the cookies from the bowl, not the ones from the plate) but only slightly, and unprompted she added, “if it’s more work to make the flakier ones, it’s not worth it.”
That’s pretty much how I felt, too.
I’m curious to see how we feel about the pies.
Appreciate the updates on your food experiments!
Thanks! Also, I thought I’d posted this, but Discourse seems to have saved a draft…
Final answer:
While the crust cookies were unambiguously flakier from the rested dough, the difference in the finished pies was minimal. My daughter preferred the rested one. My husband preferred the unrested one, saying it was flakier. I think the pies didn’t cook completely evenly, and the parts that were more done were better than the parts that weren’t completely cooked. (I usually cook deep-dish pies, and the crust is ALWAYS fully cooked by the time the filling is done. These shallow pies cooked differently.)
Eating the leftover pie a few days later, there was very little difference between the two.
So going forward, if it’s convenient to start the crust a bit before making the pies, I may do that. But I’m not going to stress over it. And I will always be sure to warm up the rested dough to room temp before rolling it out. Wow, that was a huge improvement. Rolling the chilled dough was hard work and I think it also toughened the resulting crust.