Cow-Herder's Pie

I made my corned beef early this year, because I didn't feel like waiting. We'd already had corned beef hash, but there was a bit of that left, and I wanted something different.

So I bought some ground beef, cooked that, added the corned beef and some peas and carrots, then let it all simmer for a while with some tomato juice I had left over from something else, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, I boiled (in two separate pots) some potatoes and some celery root. I added a lump of cream cheese (also leftover) to the celery root and whizzed it with the stick blender. Add the cooked potatoes to that, mashed, tasted, add added butter and milk.

I put the meat mixture into a round baking dish and topped it will dollops of the potatoes, and chucked it into the oven to brown the potatoes a bit. And that was it. New dinner from leftovers. Why cow-herder's pie? Because there was no lamb to make it shepherd's pie.

Musing: Here Comes Mr. Bunnycake!

I am an admitted sucker for interesting cake pans. So when I saw the 3-D Bunny pans at Cayenne Kitchen, I had to indulge myself.

I already have a 3-D lamb cake mold, so I figured I might as well have the companion piece. The lamb cake turned out well in the mold, despite the fact that cakes at high altitude can be tricky.

The bunny is a pretty small mold, which is good, too. I usually don't need to be baking huge cakes. I think the lamb mold that I have is a little larger, but it could just be the shape. I haven't checked the volume of the two. Heck, I haven't even unwrapped the bunny yet.

Oh, and the picture came from my scanner. I thought it might look interesting.

The neat thing about these 3-D molds is that they bake the whole 3-D shape in one piece. I have other molds that bake two sides separately that need to be glued together with frosting. That's fine, too, but this is a whole lot easier and there's no risk of the two pieces sliding or coming apart.

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Pie to Seven Decimal Places: 3.1415926

In honor of Pi Day (3/14) I decided to create a geeked-out recipe.
This pie has:

3 different fruits
1 basic pie crust recipe
4 ingredients in the crumb topping
1 nutty ingredient
5 unique layers (bottom crust, three fruits, crumb topping)
9 added flavors in the fruit layers (3 in each)
2 ingredients in common in all the layers (butter and sugar)
6 (or 7) ingredients in the pie crust recipe, depending on whether you count water as an ingredient, and whether you round up (the next digit is 5.)

Enough math, let's have pie.

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