Happy Late Pi(e) Day!

Pi(e) Day: March 14th in celebration of pi -> 3.14159etc.

Being scientists, it's pretty much a requirement to make this a work celebration.

1. Because we're nerds.
2. We are really good at being fatties.

We missed the official pi(e) day this year because it fell on a Saturday, so we postponed it to today. A few weeks ago, I volunteered to contribute something delicious to this afternoon's festivities.

It was like I momentarily lost my mind.

I don't bake. And it's not because I am incapable of baking, it's because I have no practice. I'm not about to show up to a work function and present my first ever pie to a room full of coworkers who are practically chefs.

...so I showed up to a work function presenting my first every pie/tart to a room full of coworkers who are practically chefs. I had no choice. In between trying to figure out how to play off a store bought pie as my own and wracking my brain for the simplest recipe I could think of, I remembered a family recipe for fruit pizza. Pizza definitely counts as "pie".

After work yesterday I went to the store to pick up the ingredients and check out my fresh fruit options. You know what's hard to find in grocery stores? Danish junket. My store had one. 

What's Danish junket? Nope, don't know. Just knew that I needed it.

In between calling my mom asking if the powdered sugar needed to be sifted alongside the flour, I remembered to take the sticker off of my new sifter. I also washed my recently purchased pizza pans.

Again: Baking. New.

Then came the time to separate the crust mixture into the pans. No rolling pin. I wandered around the kitchen with my crust covered hands opening cabinets trying to figure out what I could use as a substitute. After seriously contemplating a vodka bottle, I settled for a drinking glass.

Before the oven:

Next I mixed up the cream cheese topping and the bowl of that stared at me for quite some time while I diced up the fruit. So I tasted it to "make sure" I was on the right track.

Crust + cream cheese topping:

Yeah, the oven clock says 10:02. Don't judge me. It took longer than I thought.

While the crust + cream cheese chilled in the fridge for a decade, I tackled the Danish junket. It involved boiling liquid, rapid stirring, quick thinking, and the mystery powder that is the junket.

Did you know the creation of the final product can result in several ohshitohshitohshitohshit moments? There's about a two second window in there where you can irretrievably destroy this ingredient or coax it into turning out perfectly. Maybe it's just a special technique of mine.

All I could think of (during my frantic stirring, horrified facial expression, and faster stirring) was how hard the ingredient was to find and what other stores would I have to visit at 10:30 pm and how far away will I have to drive and I'm ruining this.

Sweet success: