Picture This...

One of my very favorite things about our space at PJP Buttonwood is our completely open concept baking space.  If you've visited our store, then you know that you can stand at the front door and watch us bake all of our pies completely from scratch (and well, you can actually watch us set the oven timers, clean up the dishes, spill cornstarch on the floor...anything is possible, really).  And as anyone responsible for a social media account for a business will tell you, bringing that same authenticity and interaction to customers via the Internet is a continual challenge. On occasion, Jeanne and I take a small part of our day and style a photo shoot of a fresh PJP pie straight out of the oven.  Truth be told, we love the creativity of working with pies in a manner that isn't simply baking them and boxing them for sale.  We took a few minutes early this afternoon and walked over to JoAnn's for a little inspiration...which basically entailed Jeanne shopping and me trailing behind her and demanding she JUST MAKE A DECISION ALREADY, PLEASE.  Thinking about backdrops, we started by looking at scrapbook paper and then considered a swing through the fabrics section.  Except JoAnn's carries 1.7 million-ish pieces of scrapbook paper and I quickly lost patience (are you surprised, really?).  Fabrics really might have sent me over the edge.

My interest was only piqued when we stumbled upon a big roll of something called "Project Paper:  World Map".  From there on, the planning for a great photo was fairly easy...we would take a hot Dutch Apple baby pie out of the oven, scoop out vanilla ice cream for the top of the pie, and drizzle homemade caramel sauce over it while using the world map as our backdrop for #worldpiedomination.  (And honestly, that sounds rather easy and straightforward, but it took a good 45 minutes or so to pull together what we each envisioned.  We are not professional stagers or photographers, so the struggle is always 100% real.)

And in the end, here is how it shook out...(I'm biased, but I sorta love it)...

That's Gunnar's hand holding the plate, by the way.  He never wavered while we staged him in at least 25 different poses while he just stood there holding a plate of hot pie.  (Reason #112 we will be heartbroken when he moves away in a few weeks.)  I like to think he stood there until his arm wore out while I clicked photo after photo because he believed in the greater good of bringing compelling images to social media, but it could have just been that we also demanded he eat the pie that we cut and covered with ice cream when we were finished...