Mini-Muffin Tin Pudding Pies for Pi Day- Pie in the Sky - Read Along with Me

Pi Day is almost here!  How will you be celebrating?

One of my hesitations with doing a month long Read-Along is that Pi Day falls smack dab in the middle of it. You'll have to bare with me as I include a couple Pi Day posts leading up to the big day...you know...in case you want to celebrate too. Don't worry, though, I'll include a book for the Read-Along...this time though, the book will come at the end of the post.

For those of you who are not part of a family of math/science nerds...Pi Day is March 14th or 3-14...which is as close as a date can get to 3.14 which is the decimal approximation of the number pi.

If your head is already swimming with all this...don't worry...these directions will work to make a non-mathematical and equally delicious version too.

I used to celebrate Pi Day with my students in my former life as a math teacher as a way to have an extra fun day in math, and now we celebrate it at home most years.  Fortunately, even though our friends usually think we're a little weird for celebrating Pi Day, they're more than happy to come over and share a little pie with us.

This year, since Firecracker is in school, I'll be going in to celebrate it with her class.  (I'm sure her teacher either rolled her eyes or laughed when she got my email offering to help them celebrate Pi-Day.)  As part of the celebration, I wanted to come up with a special snack that would be easy to serve and settled on mini pudding pies.  Yesterday was the test run to make sure they would work the way I was hoping.  You're probably not shocked to hear that I'm not the first person to think of making mini-pies in muffin tins, but I didn't find any guidance for making mini-baked pie shells online, so I used the regular directions from my cookbook and I'll share with you how it went.

My recipe for a double crust pie was enough for about 15 mini-pies.  Use whatever recipe you like...mine isn't anything special, so I didn't include the recipe itself.

You want to roll the crust out pretty thin.  I let the kids roll it out, and then I rolled it out more.  I thought I had it thin, but will do it even thinner next time because the crust expands as it bakes.

We used a large, washed out mayonaisse jar to cut out circles.

Then we pressed it into the muffin tins.  (You do NOT need to grease the muffin tin.)

It may be helpful to remove a small triangle of dough like this so that there is less overlapping dough.

Poke the bottom and sides of the crust well with a fork.  This will prevent bubbles from forming in the crust.

When I bake larger pie shells, I cover them with aluminum foil for the first half of the cooking time, but I skipped that with the small ones and they turned out fine.

Bake in an oven that's been preheated to 450 degrees for 10-15 minutes, depending on the thickness of your crust.

Then we mixed up two kinds of pudding.  After the crusts had cooled, we filled them pudding.  I put some of the extra pudding into sandwich sized ziploc bags and cut the corner off. 

Then I used the bags to pipe a different color of pudding on to make the pi symbol.  I have also done this with cool-whip and had success.

As an alternate way to decorate them, you can use a knife to cut a pi symbol out of extra crust, bake them on a cookie sheet, and then add them on top.  (This pie was a bit larger, but still mini...the kids have a "real" mini pie pan with their play kitchen toys.)

And it was driving the kids NUTS to have to wait for them to be decorated.  They didn't care what they looked like; they just wanted to EAT them.

They passed the taste test with flying colors.

And the easy to make test (especially if I make the next batch without the extra sets of helping hands.)  They would be SUPER easy to make if you used store-bought crust...but I'm too cheap.

If you were here, we'd share one.

And a book as promised.  I really should have planned ahead more and had some math books to share, but we already had Pie in the Sky by Lois Ehlert borrowed from the library. 

If you're not familiar with Lois Ehlert's books, you need to be.  We've loved nearly all of her books that we've managed to get our hands on.  (You might recall when we read Leaf Man last fall.)  Her illustrations are bold and unique, and many of her books have directions for accompanying activities.  (This one has a cherry pie recipe.)  They are also fairly easy to read, so that Firecracker can read many of them without help.

In this book, the family as moved into a new house.  The child's father has told her they'll get pie from their tree, and they watch the tree through the winter, spring, and summer until they're finally able to make a cherry pie...so it's a great spring-time book to read too.

***Stayed tuned tomorrow in the late afternoon Click here for some kindergarten appropriate ways to celebrate Pi-Day (meaning fun circle activities since the number pi is a bit advanced for kindergarten.)

For another great seasons book that involves pie, you can see my post about The Apple Pie Tree here.

And you can find my favorite coconut cream pie recipe here.

And finally, if you love math enough that you might actually celebrate Pi Day with your kids...then you've got to check out Boutique Academia.  She has a Pi necklace that's beautiful.

If you're just now joining us, be sure to visit our Read-Along Archives to see the books we've already read.

Please show my sponsors some love...

Hedwig Necklace from Pieces by Polly

Anatomical Heart Pendant from Boutique Academia

Mockingjay Necklace from Boutique Academia

Modern Black and Gold Hexies Baby Quilt from Pieces by Polly