We had a rocking Pi day, my friends Troy and Willie and I. We made pie till 1:15 in the morning! Then enjoyed it at 1:30. Because of a series of mishaps I don't know all of we didn't start really making the pies till almost 10 pm on 3/14. The boys had bought stuff to make a pumpkin, peach, and a from scratch apple pie. They also bought a frozen chocolate pie. Mmmm. The pie type choices were actually all my favorite pies. Troy had asked for ideas of the kinds of pie we should make and that's what I had text back, "I like apple, pumpkin and peach the most. Any of those would be good." So they went for all 3.
Troy started making crusts while Willie and I sliced apples and made the best caramel sauce ever to go in the apple pie. We put the apples in the crust, put the lattice of crust on top, the poured the caramel over the top so it coated the lattice and seeped into the apples. Yummy.
The peach pie was just a canned filling from the store. It proudly declared that one can would make one 9 inch pie. Well, we poured it in the crust and thought, "that's the least filling I've ever seen in a pie." It really looked like it should've said 2 cans makes 1 nine inch pie. And as it happened, for some unknown reason- even to them- the boys had bought a can of apple pie filling while at the store- even though we were making our apple pie from scratch. So we decided that half of a peach pie was better than a skimpily filled peach pie and we shoved all the peaches on to one half of the crust and dumped the apples into the other half. Scrumptious!
The pumpkin pie was pretty standard. No funny story here. Pumpkin pie... Delectable!
When we went to put the top on the pea-pple pie Troy was sad that he hadn't been able to finish his cookie cutter in the shape of pi. He had busted out his HP and made a very precise template for this cookie cutter he was going to make out of a big can he'd cut the top and bottom off of. He had to make sure that the perimeter of the pi shape was the same as the circumference of his can. It was actually pretty impressive stuff. Anyway, he didn't finish it, so instead of using a cool cookie cutter we cut the template out and used a knife to cut out the pi shape from the top of the pea-pple pie and then placed the cut out on the pumpkin pie when it was sufficiently baked. It looked pretty cool.
The baking was quite exciting. The pea-apple baked at 350 for an hour, the pumpkin and homemade apple baked for 15 min at 350 then longer at 400, 50-60 min and 30-40 min respectively. But we only had one oven, and it was already past 11. So we figured it all out. We baked the pea-pple pie for 45 minutes. We then added the other two pies for 15 more minutes. Then we removed the apple pie and cranked up the temp to bake the other 2 for the proper amount of time. It mostly worked. The problem came in when we added the other 2 pies. They got a little toasty on the top. For some reason we had tin-foiled the crust of the pea-pple, but not the other two. We ended up taking out the apple early to stop the scorching, we figured we could handle slightly crunchy apples. The pumpkin just had to suffer and stay in the whole time. Fortunately it had very little crust exposed to be scorched.
As the pies baked we passed the time playing uno and mexican train dominoes. At shortly after 1 we pulled the last of the pies out of the oven, enjoyed our frozen chocolate pie (Delish!) and some peach pie, our friend Sarah joined us after she had gotten off work at 1, and we played more dominoes. At 1:30 we decided the apple pie would be sufficiently cool to eat, so we ate it. As we cut slices the caramel would hit the bottom of the pie pan and sizzle. We were all very impressed at the heat retention of the glass pie pan, until we realized the reason was because the burner it was sitting on was still on from when we made the caramel. Well, looks like cooking at late hours does have it's hazards. Fortunately we did not burn down the house or injure anyone. But we did make good pie, and enjoyed it at 1:30 am.
If you look closely at the pea-pple you can see the different fillings. = ) Hooray for nerds cooking!
