Celebrate Pi Day (3/14) with a spherical pie!

She Creates Stuff has a great HOWTO that uses a spherical cake mold to make a ball-shaped, sealed pie-crust that you can stuff with your favorite jammy gooey goodness, and so celebrate the mysterious infinitude that is Pi.

To create it, I used a Wilton Sports Ball pan. This pan has two half spheres and two ring stands. It is intended to be used to bake a round cake but, instead, I formed a crust around it. Once baked, I filled the crust and cemented it together with white chocolate.
The trick to to create a barrier on one side of the filled crust by either securing a disc of cooked crust with the same chocolate that will be securing the two pieces together, or by making a chocolate disc and securing it to the crust on the inside. Allow the chocolate to solidify before continuing and assembling the sphere.

Pi Day - Spherical Pie (Thanks, starshipminivan, via Submitterator!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Culture • howto

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Anonymous

alternatively, you could have put the dough for the crust inside the half-bowl form and then fill the resulting dough bowl with dried lentils or peas, then bake it. (in german we call that “blind backen”, which translates as blind baking.)
Anonymous

celebrate biscuit day http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201541153207255 . Just do it!
RebNachum

Two words: Centrifugal oven.
PaulR

Alternately, you can get a bunch of profiteroles at your local patissier. Enough of them to make a croque-en-bouche. Then you can also discuss cutting the croque-en-bouche to make circles, ellipses, parabolas,…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Croqembouche.JPG

At my sister’s wedding, some decades ago, the restaurateur, an immigrÃ© from France, refused to allow the usual fruit-cake monstrosities in his restaurant. Instead, he made a croque-en-bouche using maple syrup as the glaze holding it together, and decorated with local wild flowers. The profiteroles were filled with mascarpone cheese. I still remember how good it was.
pjcamp

Whatcha got there is a walnut.

Or an ovary.
LuckyNotLucky

When making a demon core pie, be sure to prop open the two hemispheres with a bit of frosting.
Anonymous

4/3 larger than our cubic pie!
stuiethegod

I’d hate to be the buzz kill for such an epic pie… but how the heck do you eat it with out making a terrible mess of everything?
- Pantograph
  
  You don’t eat it without making a mess. That is not a bug, it’s a feature.
awillett

Next stop: Death Star Pie. Though I’m not sure what filling would be most appropriate.
- Lobster
  
  Dark chocolate? :D
OriGuy

Could you do something similar to make a meat pie? I assume you would need meat from a spherical cow.
settle4

Isn’t it enough that pies are already circles??
- rrh
  
  I thought pie are squared?
Anonymous

4/3*Pi*r^2 filling
or 4*Pi*r^2 of touchable roundness
starshipminivan

Actually, it’s not that hard to cut: http://www.instructables.com/id/Spherical-Pie/#step6