Happy Pi Day

I am by no means a math person. I can handle the basics, and I managed to pass statistics in order to get my BA, but the math buck stopped there for me. I handle numbers on a daily basis (oh, the joys of retail math), and yet I dread all math related activity. However, even I can look at the date and notice that 3-14 is just like 3.14, which is the calculation for Pi (3.1415926 . . .) shortened to two decimal places. For other non-math people, Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Wow, that makes me sound pretty smart.

What makes me sound even smarter is that I decided to celebrate by making a pie, because Pi is about circles and pies are round. I found a recipe on Joelen's blog, What's Cookin' Chicago? Joelen's Culinary Adventures with Friends and Food (which if you've never visited, I highly recommend that you do), for Chocolate Toffee Cream Pie which sounded like it would be a great way to celebrate.

The pie is pretty simple to make (even simpler if you skip the directions for the crust and use a pre-made one, which I attempted to do until the whole thing ended up in pieces on my kitchen table), and it was torture waiting 2 hours for it to set.

Coffee Toffee Cream Pie

from Joelen's Blog, originally from Mrs. Field's: Best Cookie Book Ever

Ingredients:

for crust:

1 1/2 C. chocolate wafer crumbs

5 Tbs. butter, melted

2 Tbs. sugar

for the filling:

3/4 C. heavy cream

6 oz. semisweet chocolate chips

3/4 C. cream cheese

1/4 C. packed light brown sugar

3/4 C. chopped chocolate covered toffee candy

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Make the crust: Combine the wafer crumbs, melted butter and sugar in a medium bowl. Press into a 9 inch pie plate. Bake for 10 minutes and let cool.

To make the filling, measure the heavy cream into a 2 cup measuring cup. Heat in the microwave for 1 minute.

Add the chocolate chips. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes, then stir until the chips are melted and combined.

Beat together the cream cheese and sugar.

Beat in the cream mixture.

Fold in 1/2 C. of the candy pieces.

Put the mixture into the pie crust and top with remaining candy pieces.

Refrigerate until set, 2 hours or overnight.

One Year Ago: Very Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting