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!