I Just Cannot Imagine,

how many painstaking hours,

must have gone into the creation of this or any of these pies, photographs Karin Pfeiff-Boschek/Instagram,

 these are all the work of pastry designer Karin Pfeiff-Boschek,

 who bakes three times a week, 

 and gives most of them to her friends after taking some photographs of them and sharing them with her Instagram fans,

 Karin Pfeiff-Boschek learned to bake from her mother and grandmothers as a girl growing up in central Germany, and settled on pies simply because there were many talented cake decorators in her country, while pie decoration was virtually unheard of. Her passion for pies was only fueled by her husband. Bruce, an Indiana-native who moved to Germany in the 1960’s to study for his PhD. His mother was an award-wining baker, and he used her secrets to wow Karin with the most amazing pies,

"I always liked his apple, rhubarb, pumpkin or blueberry pies," Pfeiff-Boschek told The Washington Post back in 2018. "At some point, I thought the top crust would offer a good canvas for artistic creation."

 “I found that by cooling the dough while creating decorations, using a very thin, sharp knife such as a scalpel and working very precisely it was possible to create ornate decorations that held their shape during baking,” Karin Pfeiff-Boschek said. I make it a priority to also show the baked pie because regardless of how beautiful a pie may look before baking, it never will be served in that state and must look good after it comes out of the oven.”

You can check out more of Karin Pfeiff-Boschek’s amazing pies on her Instagram, where she regularly posts new designs, but if you want something more personal, you can also buy her book, Elegant Pie, which contains 25 stunning pies and step-by-step guides on how to make them yourself, looking at these it almost makes me want to go to the kitchen and give pie baking a try, I did say almost!