The best holidays revolve around food, and the very best feature dessert as the centerpiece of the day. On March 14—also known as 3.14—there’s a celebration for Pi, the mathematical constant that just happens to be approximated as 3.14. Since “Pi” is pronounced like “pie,” people honor the homophone by baking the delicious dessert. When assembling a pie for festivities like this, many go with the tried-and-true method of covering the filling with a thin layer of rolled dough. But, it seems like just as many brave bakers are crafting creative pie crusts that look too good to eat (almost).
In conventional pie construction, the lattice pattern (aka crisscrossing strips of dough) is another go-to design for filling cover. Some bakers use it as a starting point for their edible creations and vary the width of the strips for visual excitement. Often, they’ll add braided dough or small leaf patterns for extra pizzazz. Other bakers experiment with intricate cutouts, like the mandala design seen on Kitchen Heals Soul's maple apple pie. (They used a special pie top cutter to do this.)
Our most favorite creative pie crusts, though, revolve around letters. Jo Harrington implores us to eat more pie (with pleasure!), and Marko Josipović went Pi Day meta with his ode to math. Here, the Greek symbol is cut out from the rolled-dough top and surrounded by the famous 3.14.
