Even though I didn’t do too much work on my dissertation yesterday, I was doing something somewhat mathematical – I was making little pies for Pi Day, which is today March 14!!!! Now, I know that I usually make cupcakes and no – I am not admitting defeat, even though NPR posted this article in January claiming cupcakes were dead and that it was time for the pie! It just made sense to make pies for Pi Day!  I made 24 little apple pies to bring to campus. I must admit, I did not make my own crust or filling though. I used these little Keebler Graham Cracker Ready Crusts. I remember my mom using these when I was a kid. I decided to top the apple filling with my uncle’s apple crisp topping made from butter, flour, and brown sugar. Yummy! Here they were baking in the oven. The next step was to really make these pieces of pi…. So, I melted some green Wilton Candy Melts to pipe out the first 23 digits of pi and the decimal point. Do you know what those are? Well, in case you don’t here they are.

There is actually more than one copy here since I wanted to make sure I had some back-ups in case any of the numbers broke when I was placing them on the pies. It wasn’t too bad… not many of them broke. I was surprised… Using candy melts is much easier than using royal icing! Since I am such a dork I decided it would be cool to arrange these in a circle since pi is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter (at least in Euclidean geometry). I also wanted to give these out to people so I put each one in a plastic bag and attached a fork with a little tag like this:

I love the little tag. I found that image on the Internet and I added my little PhDcupcaker image and the text “Enjoy a piece of Pi.” It was so fun to make these.  Josh helped attached the black ribbon to the tags the day before so it didn’t take too long to package things up. So, I will leave you with my circle. If you click on the picture below you will see what the final packaged pieces of pi looked liked.

Happy Pi Day!

This is my first official Martha Stewart Cupcake Club post. Every month someone picks a cupcake form Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes and we all bake and post it. Jeannette at The Whimsical Cupcake picked Martha’s Candied-Hazelnut Cupcakes from page 284. You can find the recipe here, but if you buy the book you will have all 175 “inspired ideas.” I was glad that these cupcakes came up because I actually don’t know if I would have ever made them because I am not a huge nut fan. I agree with those that said that these were time-consuming. They sure were! My husband plans to take these with him to school tomorrow for a faculty breakfast. I think they are a good breakfast cupcake! So, here is what the batter looked like.

I must admit that I did not read the directions carefully enough! Anybody else do what I did? I read the Candied-Hazelnut recipe and it said it made 24 cucpakes, but then you have to go to the Almond-Hazelnut cupcake recipe, which only makes 16! If you follow the recipe on the internet it tells you it makes 16. So, I made 24 and that is why, as you can see,  some of my cucpakes are tiny! As I was doing this I thought… I must be doing something wrong… Oh well!

The candied hazelnuts were also not easy! It took forever for me to get the right consistency for me to easily dip and remove each hazelnut. In the end I got most of them to work…. a few ended up stuck in the caramel. Here’s what they looked like when they were dripping off the side of my counter.

This was also pretty messy… the strings of caramel were sticky and moving around quite a bit. When I broke them off I  couldn’t get them to be all the same size and they weren’t all straight, but that’s okay! So, here is a few of them all assembled.

I had a lot of little pieces of caramel strings that ended up on the wax paper I layed down… When I looked at it I thought hmmm… that looks like Martha’s Spun-Sugar cupcakes. So, I figured I’d place some of that on one cupcake as a teaser for those… I am not sure that I will be making those anytime soon because they also look like a lot of work!

Today was a crazy baking day. I also made some great Pi Day treats today too, but you’ll have to stop by on March 14 to see those!

One day…. a long time ago (before Christmas!) I was thinking about branching out from my usual cupcake and making some cookies. Since I am currently on “Spring Break”  I thought I should finally post these.

I was searching on the Internet for some cool Christmas sugar cookies and I came across one of my new favorite sites – Sweetopia! There were some really good directions about using Royal Icing to decorate your cookies. I thought the cookies on the site looked so good – really professional, like the gourmet cookies you can find. I thought for my first attempt  I would try to make some Christmas Trees. I found a great recipe for Rolled Chocolate Cookie dough in the Cookie Craft Christmas book. Check it out on page 7. They were pretty tasty! I made the cookies at home and brought them to my parents in New York for decorating. Once we got there, I made Antonia74’s Royal Icing that I found on Sweetopia. I kept about half of the icing white and died the other half green using some Wilton icing color. It took me a little while to get the right consistency. I had to add additional water until it was right. Sweetopia has some great tutorials and tips including the 10 Second Royal Icing Rule. Check out all of the great tutorials! After using a pastry bag to apply the royal icing I sprinkled each with some white sanding sugar. I am partial to the green ones – I think they came out really cute. I’ve been meaning to try to make some more cookies…. I just haven’t gotten around to it. One of these days…..