Happy pi day!

i know, i know, i'm 2 days late with this post, but the important thing is that i *made* the pie on pi day, right?

so as you all (aka my 2 readers) know, i recently joined twitter. and while i mostly only follow friends, i also follow a few foodie-type people, who post about things happening in boston as well as restaurants and food events, etc. and one of those people i follow is @eatboston. well, a week or two ago, he mentioned that he wanted to have a pi day party - a palooza, if you will, to which people would bring pies, and at which much pie would be consumed, in honor of that good ol' 3.14159(...) and i thought...that sounds like fun! i should make a pie!

so while sarah and i were at tupelo last week for dinner (highly recommended, btw) we brainstormed a bit on pies. there were many fun pie ideas, but none solved the problem i have been having lately. the problem of not being able to eat all of the fruit my CSA gives me. i know, they don't give me that much fruit...2 grapefruits and 3 apples a week, i should be able to eat all that, right? well at some point, i got a bit behind, and the fruit just started piling up! i dont know what to do with it all! it seems that even if i take a grapefruit in for breakfast several times a week, the pile never gets smaller! what could i do? make a grapefruit tart, is clearly the answer.

i was quite torn about what the filling should be. i found a recipe online calling for a marscapone filling, which i have never done before but have heard good things, and it sounded fun. but i also sort of wanted a lemon custard. i actually wanted it to be a bit thick, like a lemon meringue pie (without the meringue). tough choice. somewhere between a custard and the lemon meringue filling. similar to the texture of pastry cream that has NOT been lightened by whipped cream. anyway, trying to figure out what to do, and i decided to go with the simplest, and try to marscapone (which, btw, i was unaware of the texture of, having never used it before. i never would have gone with it had i realized just how soft it would be). i was also originally going to be lazy, and use a store-bought pie dough, but it went bad on me! so i had to frantically make a pate sucre that morning! which i didnt have time to chill again after rolling out, so the sides totally shrunk in! so disappointing...

so the pate sucre (which i think i overcooked juuuuust a little bit, because it was just a bit too crunchy), covered in a layer of mixed berry jam, then the marscapone filling (with some crystallized ginger and grapefruit juice and confectioner's sugar), topped with fresh sections of grapefruit. and yes, i sectioned all of those and yes, i had a papercut or something on my hand for the citrus juices to sting, but i made it out with enough nice slices to decorate the top of the pie, for one of the prettier tarts i've ever made. next time, i think i will experiment with the filling a bit more....