Pi day disasters

HAPPY PI DAY (3/14)! I love pi day. It is just about the geekiest holiday to exist and as a self proclaimed nerd, I revel in it. In honor of pi day, I had to make some sort of pie cupcakes. I have to admit, I was a little nervous about this baking endeavor. My ONLY task at thanksgiving last year was to bake a pecan pie. I think I would have executed it perfectly had I not BURNT IT TO A CRISP. BLACK AS NIGHT PECAN PIE. Granted, there was a big fat mashed potato fiasco happening simultaneously and anyone could have forgotten the pie in the oven. Whoops. So instead of doing this pie recipe on my own, I decided I needed to do a little recruiting. I have two favorite pies in the whole world. My Uncle Rich makes the best apple pie know to man kind. It is the food I most look forward to when we go to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. On the other hand, Ben's mom is just an incredible baker in general and makes the most divine mixed berry pie ever. I consulted with both of them and got the recipes to these delicious pies to see if I could come up with a cupcake from them. Since I couldn't decide what type of pie I wanted to make on this special occasion, I just made both. Thanks for the recipes!!

Trying to conjure up this cupcake recipe was really tricky. At first I was just going to make baby-sized pies in cupcake tins and call those cupcake pies. But that seemed like cheating. There wasn't any actual cupcake to it. I made "apple pie cupcakes" before I started this blog and they were delicious, but they didn't seem pie-y enough. They were just cinnamon cupcakes topped with caramelized apples. I wanted to incorporate a cakey batter, fruit, and the crispy pie crust.

This day was a sad time in my kitchen. This was my first cupcake recipe that was TOTALLY DISGUSTING. These cupcakes looked like toxic waste and were so soggy. I can't even provide a recipe because no one should ever have to come within 100 yards of them. But Charlotte and I had a blast making them as always.

The outside of the cupcakes looked WAY better than the inside.

The idea for the cupcakes was to make an oat-y, brown sugary batter sort of resembling a crumble of some sort that you would find on top of a pie. We filled the liners about half full with the batter (which was delicious and I have lots of ideas for some oat-y, brown sugary cupcakes now), filled the middle with a fruit-pie filling, and then surrounded the fruit with more batter. So far so good.

 Then we topped them with pie crust and baked them. 

This is where they get gross. The berries had too much water so when they were baking, the water just sopped out into the cake and made the most hideous mush. Not to mention a horrible color. The crust sort of just sat on top so they looked nice until the crust fell off... I can't even put a picture of the inside on here because they were so nasty.

Since they were totally inedible, we decided to take advantage of the nerdy day and pipe the phases of mitosis on them. But even that didn't work because the frosting wouldn't stick to the sugar on the crust. They were bad news.

We tried a lattice technique for the apples, which weren't quite as terrible and soggy, but they still weren't good by any means. 

I think I need to just stick to the things I know and let the real pie experts worry about pie. I hesitate to mention Rich and Sue in this post because I don't want to slander their good names as pie artists. They are good at pie. I am not. 

Oh well! On to the next! I still have plenty of recipes up my sleeve and this little disaster was probably necessary to keep me humble in my baking adventures.

And with that, I leave you with my favorite nerd joke of all time: Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says "I think I lost an electron". The other says "Are you positive?"

xoxo,

KG