Transcendent pi(e): the Neapolitan.
It's worthy of your time.
Happy (almost) Pi Day! What’s not to love about a lighthearted occasion to eat pie and marvel at math?
Here’s how we’re commemorating the holiday this year:
We’ll be open tomorrow (the day before Pi Day, aka 313 day!) selling plenty of mini pies, pie slices, pie sandwich cookies, hand pies, and even some non-pie baked goods. Flavors include: Malted Lime, Salted Maple, Apple Butter Custard, Milk Chocolate Chess, The Banana Pete…to see the full menu, visit our website.
On 3/14 we’re hosting two Baking Buddies Pi Day Extravaganza classes! Together we’ll celebrate by making hand pies, talking about infinity, and more.
Later that afternoon, we’re delivering an order of nearly three hundred sweet and savory hand pies to the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum for their Pi Day fundraiser.
Sharing the recipe for the NEAPOLITAN PIE!
While planning the shop’s Pi Day menu, I asked people on Instagram to choose between the Malted Lime and Neapolitan pie. Personally, I’m more of a berry/tart fruit pie person, but these two knock the socks off my tastebuds. Very different flavor and texture combinations, but equally luscious.
But…both pies are labor intensive and they take up space in the refrigerator; with our tiny team (Lana and I), we could only choose one. In the end, Malted Lime was triumphant! No one is really a loser in this race because today we present: the Neapolitan pie recipe.
Thanks to Lana’s sharp memory, I can report that this pie debuted on the Pi Day menu in 2020. We asked the staff to submit menu development requests, and Kara suggested French Silk Pie! She fondly remembers eating it at Bakers Square, and she’s not the only one: I’ve heard about this particular French Silk Pie for years from baking class participants who grew up going to that midwestern pie restaurant. Since they’ve closed their Michigan locations, the only way to get a Bakers Square pie is if you’re at a Famous Dave’s. Is this too much information? Time to move on!
Our approach to creating recipes is essentially tradition with a twist. How can we take a familiar idea and make it new? Certainly, this pie was built by mashing together the concepts of French Silk pie and Neapolitan ice cream. Growing up, cake was always served with a side of ice cream at family birthday parties. My mom would often buy a box of Neapolitan since the trio of flavors offered something for everyone: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate.
The pie begins with a flaky, crispy, deeply golden brown crust. What follows is a layer of ruby chocolate ganache spread along the bottom to represent the strawberry, a decadent, creamy chocolate mousse, and finally a pile of lightly sweetened, freshly whipped cream. When you get a bite with all four layers, it’s truly ethereal!
A note: this recipe requires you to wash and dry your stand mixer bowl three separate times. Slightly annoying, though not enough to deter you, I hope!