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

Cory Doctorow at 9:55 am Mon, Mar 14, 2011

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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!)
 
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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.

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  • 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 immigré 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