TracyFood

(Belated) Happy Pi Approximation Day! 23 July 2009 12:16 pm

Posted by Tracy in : baking,cooking,dessert,events,geekery,pictures,seasonality,whoops , trackback

I meant to post this yesterday, but then I got distracted, perhaps by the delicious desserts…

* * * * *

Mathematically inclined readers probably already know about celebrating Pi Day on March 14 (ideally at 1:59 in the morning, for more decimal places). What a good excuse for pie, right? Pie for everyone! Yay! Somewhat lesser-known but no less delicious is Pi Approximation Day, July 22. You see, 22/7 = 3.14285… etc. So how does one celebrate the approximation of pi? T-Rex has one suggestion over at Dinosaur Comics, but I prefer to approximate the baked good with other baked goods that are not quite pie: cobblers, crisps, and tarts. Given my history of struggling mightily with pie crusts, 22/7 is my kind of holiday. So yesterday I hit the Union Square Greenmarket with fruit on my mind, and returned home with six beautiful peaches and about a pound and a half of blueberries. (Also a quart of buttermilk, in case I decided to go the “blueberry cobbler with biscuit-y topping” route.) Then I broke open my trusty copy of Baking Illustrated, and here is the result:

Free-form peach tartlets! Which turned out tasty as all heck! I used the individual tartlets variation on the Free Form Summer Fruit Tart recipe, which means I have dough left for four more of these sweeties at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Nom nom nom…. I can basically fill this crust with whatever juicy summer fruit’s around, so I might try blueberry-peach in a later batch. It’ll be interesting to see if the dough really is “easy to work” when adequately cooled; last night I was racing the clock to have desserts ready before the date changed. (I could’ve started earlier, but lately it’s been too hot for me to use the oven between about 10 AM and 10 PM, so that slowed me down a bit, but not too much. Yay!) My runner-up recipe was blueberry-peach crisp, which would’ve been faster, but I wasn’t in the mood for nuts and ended up very pleased and proud of myself for going the riskier, closer-to-pie route. Still, I think I’ll be making cobbler as soon as I can gather enough berries. And wondering what’s gotten into me that I’m suddenly so into baking desserts…. Peter’s home, for garlic’s sake, I shouldn’t be doing his thing.