Pi Day Empanadas

By Sara ElSayed

I’m sure that most of you are aware of the National Number Holiday that occurred this week. One that math teachers can’t resist providing opportunities for extra credit, projects or even a food day. That’s right, this Saturday is Pi Day! The food days, however, are not as exciting. Year in and year out, all that is provided is pie, pie and even more pie. Yes, there are some savior students who bring cookies for a bit of variation, and others who bring square brownies for a laugh, but everything else is pretty much the same. So, for this week’s Pi Day, I avoided making your stereotypical holiday treat, and instead, tackled a new challenge: Pi Day Empanadas.

To make this recipe, I took the instructions and ingredients from a Food & Wine Banoffee Pie Recipe. The ingredients were fairly simple to acquire, except for the dulce de leche which I was not able to acquire. This ingredient, if not store-bought, takes 3 hours to prepare by itself, which is time that I didn’t have. Instead, sweetened condensed milk was used as a substitute. Empanada dough is very simple to pie crust, however, it does take a lot of time, and patience to prepare. Store-bought pie dough was used for time purposes for the recipe.

A four-inch circular cookie cutter was used to cut out the circles for each empanada. A small circle of melted chocolate, a slight amount of the caramel syrup and just a few pieces of banana made up the filling. The recipe from Food & Wine did put a homemade whipped topping on the pie, but for the empanada’s purposes, this was saved at the end. To give the whip flavor, the remainder of the condensed milk was mixed in with an electric mixer until it formed stiff peaks, resulting in a light and airy sweet dip.

The baking followed the instructions of the crust label, and the timing was guessed (and fortunately correct). Although a few sprung open due to a poor sealing job, all of the sweet treats were baked until they began to brown.

The sweet treats turned out wonderfully. Although the filling tended to spill out the sides of the crust (the spill was easy to snap off) the ratio of pastry to filling favored the pastry. The chocolate filling remained melty even though it had been hours after the treats had been taken out of the oven. You could barely taste the caramel-like filling, but the banana made a bold statement.

In the face of a day riddled with endless pies and cookies, these empanadas will astound your friends, classmates (and math teacher) and give them something new to chew on.