A few months ago, we celebrated Pi Day in my office. Most of the pies were store-bought, but I decided to flip through Simply Delicious and see if there was anything worth contributing. I decided on 16-11: Meringue-Topped Chocolate Pie–everyone likes chocolate, and we had had a mishap with the lemon meringue pie on the way back from the store while preparing the day before.
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If you’re not familiar with Pi Day, it takes place on March 14th, which when written as a numeric date is 3-14 (at least in the U.S. it is–some countries reverse the order). Pi (the mathematical constant represented by the Greek letter Ï€) is usually rounded up to 3.14, so March 14th is celebrated with actual pies (and a bit of math) as a play-on-words. 😂
No one really needs an excuse to eat pie, but “It’s a math joke” is certainly an acceptable one.
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I’m always apprehensive about using almonds or any kind of nuts in food for other people due to allergens (spent over a decade in schools and/or food service), but most people in my office seem pretty relaxed about it.
Since I have a few people in my personal life that have almond allergies, work is where most of the almond-related recipe results are going to end up. However, in this case it doesn’t matter either way because I’m going to use some macadamia nuts I have instead of almonds, since the almonds I have aren’t slivered.
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Ingredients. Macadamia nuts for almonds, as I mentioned. I may not have any almond allergies that I’m aware of at work, but I do have a good friend/colleague that is gluten-free–therefore this pie’s going to be made with GF flour so that she can partake.
A year or so ago, I had made 17-62: Scandinavian Coffee Cake gluten-free for her (and the office) as well. When I went to find the link to that entry, I realized I must have never actually written it–it was nowhere to be found on the site. When I went into the photo library in my computer to locate and pull the pictures to write the entry, I couldn’t find them anywhere.
At this point, I either didn’t take pictures at all, took them and deleted them accidentally, or I imagined the whole thing. I’m guessing it’s the second, so looks like I’ll be remaking that one sometime in the near future.
07/17/2018 EDIT: I found the pictures, and posted the entry–you can find it linked here or above. Carry on.
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Blending the crust ingredients in the food processor. I suppose that would be considered “processing” more so than “blending”.
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This is the “coarse crumb” texture you’re looking for.
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Pressing the dough into a pie pan. I don’t like bringing my cookware to work when I can avoid it–I hate having to keep track of it all day or leave it there overnight with leftovers. I have a ton of disposable pie pans left over from a catering/personal cook side gig thing I was doing a few years ago, so I’ll use up one of those for this.
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Tried to do a fancy texture on the crust–it worked better on some sides than on others. Gluten-free flour doesn’t get the same browning that all-purpose flour does, so it didn’t come out quite as defined as I had hoped it would.
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Working on the chocolate filling.
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There’s some fancy math you have to do with this recipe to be smart with your eggs (you’ll need a total of 4 for the entire thing)–here’s how I broke it down:
- Crust: 1 egg yolk
- Total: 1 egg – 0 whites, 1 yolk
- Leftover: 1 white
- Filling: 1 egg, 2 egg yolks
- NEW total: 4 eggs – 1 white, 4 yolks
- NEW leftover: 3 whites
- Meringue: 2 egg whites
- FINAL total: 4 eggs – 3 whites, 4 yolks
- FINAL leftover: 1 white (which you can use to increase the meringue recipe–just add 1-2 additional tbsp of sugar when you make it)
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Adding the egg to the filling. Don’t worry–that’s gluten-free flour in there as well.
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Getting ready to bake the crust. Simply Delicious doesn’t tell you to prick the crust with a fork (or dock it), but I do it just out of habit from making tons of quiches–if you don’t, the crust bubbles and becomes uneven while pre-baking.
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Whisking the filling…with a whisk.
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Looks pretty similar to pudding–it’s not that far off. If this makes you want pudding, check out 15-49: Chocolate Pudding Deluxe or 14-16: Chocolate Nut Pudding.
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Filled the pre-baked crust with the filling. Like I said, gluten-free flour just doesn’t brown the same way as all-purpose flour–that crust could be a little more golden. It’ll pick up a bit of color when it goes back in for the meringue, but don’t expect miracles.
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Getting there. If you need a visual guide for meringue stages, check this out.
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Like I mentioned up top, I subbed out macadamia nuts for almonds–I pulsed them a few times in the food processor to chop them up, spread them out on a sheet pan, and popped them in the oven for about 5-7 minutes at 350-375ºF to give them a nice toast. When you start to smell them, they’re done.
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Spreading the meringue out. I could have whipped it a bit harder, but it’s late on the night before I’m bringing this to work–it’ll do.
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Spreading the toasted macadamia nuts on top of the meringue.
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I ended up tossing these extra macadamia nuts into a baggie and back into the freezer for a future culinary adventure.
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After baking. I had to take it to work this way and hope that everything looked okay on the inside.
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Final plate, in true office party style: on a sad, oversized styrofoam plate in a conference room with a bunch of other store-bought pies that we ate during a weekly staff meeting.
Never grow up, kids.
It’s not all bad–sometimes you get a pie buffet on a random Wednesday at work. This pie was okay, but nothing super exciting. A total Wednesday-at-work-but-we’re-having-pie type of pie.
Grade: B