Pie chart pie

I should probably hang up my keyboard and cease blogging.  I think I've reached the pinnacle of my baking career.  And at such a young age, too.

This week, I made a pie chart pie. 

This all came about because I work in a place where being geeky makes you cool.  We like statistics and frequency tables and regressions.  And yes, pie charts too.  Last week I was creating some pie charts for a report, and a silly Friday afternoon conversation led me to wonder if it would be possible to actually create a pie in pie chart form.  So I took a poll of colleagues' fruit preferences, and decided to attempt a pie that would show the results in their correct proportions.  Lemon turned out to be most popular, with 4 votes, followed by 2 each for strawberry and blueberry, and 1 each for apple and kiwi.

I'm not going to provide step by step instructions, because I'm not sure who else would be crazy enough to try and make this.  I decided not to google it before I made it, because it would have been disappointing to find out that this wasn't an original idea.  But when I did search the internet for it after it was done, I discovered that I am probably the first person to have thought of doing this.  I'm going to have to look into copyright!

However, should you ever try and recreate this for yourself, my method was to start by making the dough for pie crust (any recipe for shortcrust will do - I went with the one I used recently for tarte tatin) and chilling that in the fridge for half an hour or so.  Then roll it out and use it to fill a flan dish, making sure that the pastry comes up and slightly over the edges of the dish.  With the extra dough, fashion small walls to divide up the segments, and push them into the base of the pie.  You could use beaten egg or milk to help fix them in place, but I decided to just treat the pie crust like plasticine and mould it by hand, and it worked fine.  Then cut out pieces of tin foil large enough to fit in each segment, and weigh down with baking beads.  Cook the pie crust for about half an hour in an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees, remove and leave to cool completely before filling.


What you use for filling is entirely your own choice.  I would recommend the following for lemon, blueberry, strawberry, and kiwi (adjusting for the quantity needed for each segment) but there are lots of good recipes out there that would work just as well.

Where it gets tricky is the timing.  For my pie, the lemon curd and the apple needed to be in the oven for 25-30 minutes, but the strawberry only needed 6-8 minutes, and the blueberry and the kiwi weren't supposed to be cooked at all.  However, if you leave foil in those segments the pie crust shouldn't burn, and you can fill them afterwards when the rest of the pie has cooled.

And you know what?  It was a lot of work.  It took about three and a half hours to make.  But it was all worth it for the reaction of all my lovely colleagues and friends.  I'm very glad to know people who think that an endeavour like this isn't completely insane, and enable me in my culinary ambitions.

Now thinking of starting a side-business called Pie Squared...there must be a market for statistical baked goods out there!

Banana, bran and blueberry muffins for a snowy day, or any day

B³ x 2 Muffins - and I'm no mathematician!

I wasn't expecting to make muffins this morning.  I had more useful things to do.  But then, I wasn't expecting it to snow either.  And here I am at 11.10 with a latte and a muffin, feeling warm inside and satisfied with my morning's work.  Taking the compost down to the end of the freezing garden and changing the batteries on the outside thermometer sensor, both of which will numb my fingers, can wait for another time.

It's a grey, soft and still morning.  The snow is there, like a fine mist and yet it's catching the leaves and turning them lacy.  The roads are not affected though, so I'll be good to go when I finally get out to do all the useful things postponed for the 3Bs.

Banana, Bran and Blueberries.  Good combination, and this recipe, adapted from one I found online (oh, why do I have so much difficulty in sticking to the originals?) has worked well.  My cousin arrives for a visit tomorrow.  I hope they last until then.  Factor Kit into the equation and we'll be lucky if even one or two survive for 24 hours.

The x3 also refers to the fact that the recipe requires three bowls (and therefore a dishwasher).

225 ml buttermilk (I always substitute with 1 cup ordinary milk to 4 tsp white vinegar)

85g wheat bran

1 egg

125g soft brown sugar, light or dark is fine

5 tabs olive oil

2 small ripe bananas, mashed *

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

85g wholemeal flour (self raising makes the muffins lighter)

60g fine porridge oats or oat bran 

1 tsp bicarb (or baking soda for our North American cooks!)

1 tsp baking powder

100g fresh or frozen blueberries

if you don't have or like blueberries, then try 100g chopped walnuts or raisins

In Bowl 1:  mix together sour milk and wheat bran and let sit for a few minutes so that the bran is absorbed by the liquid.

In Bowl 2:  beat together egg, sugar, oil, banana and vanilla.

In Bowl 3:  stir together flour, oats, bicarb and baking powder.  Add the contents of Bowl 3 to Bowl 1 and mix roughly then finally beat in Bowl 2 - well, not the bowl part, obviously.

Finally add the blueberries, nuts or raisins.

Bake in prepared muffin tins at 200º for about 20 minutes until done.  Makes 12.

*  I think it was Alex who told me about bananas and I imagine she might have got it from the Orangette link which you can check out from our home page, but it's fine to freeze the too-ripe-to-eat ones in a zip-top bag.  They go black but they defrost in minutes and slip out of their skins looking truly revolting and smelling strongly of overripe banana, but they're soft and mash well into any recipe and I have a freezer drawer full of frozen bananas so any further banana recipes would be welcomed by me.

And hey, I've killed two birds with one stone this morning as I've now got a picture for my 365Project!