I watched a course (it seems generous to say I “took” a course) on food photography and styling on Domestika. It seems like a good skill to supplement my baking/cooking/cocktail interests, so I’m gonna try to practice a little…you know, with all my free time.

I saw these ZaNy ZoMbiE cookies at Target and thought that would be a good place to practice. I actually really like how this came out (featured image). They were easy enough to make—it was a premade mix.

Less successful were these pumpkin hand pies.

First, the drama:

I wanted to keep it simple but I couldn’t find pie crust at the store. So I was forced to make delicious, all-butter crust from scratch (from my favorite, Pie School). For the filling, I was like “oh I’ll just follow the recipe on the can” because I am DUMB. Pumpkin pie filling is completely liquid pre-cooking. So, not going to work in a hand pie.

I tried freezing the filling, which only sort of worked. It worked in the sense that the filling was solid enough to put in the crust, but it was too solid too make the hand pie concept work…it didn’t squish down enough, so I could only use a tiny amount. Also, I left the crust in the fridge, so it was too hard to crimp effectively. The pies did bake, but they were basically just crust pies with a courtesy amount of pumpkin filling. Pretty flavorless. ADDITIONALLY, in my attempts to get them to brown a little more, I did an egg wash. But I also put the wash over the eyes and mouths, and the egg cooked over and hid the filling. Like literally everything went wrong lmao.

The second round—because I am COMMITTED, so I tried again—I added some extra sugar and a little pumpkin pie spice to the crust to give it a little more flavor. I also decided to follow an actual pumpkin hand pie recipe and just did pumpkin puree + sugar and spice, so it was much firmer while also being squishy. The pies turned out much better, although I they weren’t as brown as I would like because our oven is absolutely the worst. I didn’t have time to bake them for like 15 extra hours.

Anyhoos. After so many trials, I had very little patience for the actual photo. I knew I wanted to do the surprised bitten pumpkin. Originally I was thinking something brighter (more like the cookie one) but the pies came out looking so ~rustic~ that I didn’t think it would work. So I went for something darker but stuck with the orange.

I don’t like it because the pies themselves don’t look very good*, there is too much empty space, and the light is just kinda of bleh, even with some editing. I should have completely abandoned my original idea rather than doing this weird hybrid attempt. Oh well.

The main lesson learned is I can’t cram these things into a toddler nap. I need to schedule more time for them. 🙂

*Food photography is double hard because you also need to be a great chef! lulz