Behind the Scenes of Thirty Pies by Ellie F. '28
aka i ramble about logistics at 2 am
This is a behind the scenes for this year’s Pi Day Announcement Blog! Read it here: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/pi-day-2026-food-institute/
Last September, Ceri, my bloggerboss, reached out asking if I’d be down to make some sort of bad ideas flavored blog for our Pi Day Announcement, the yearly blogs project to announce the time and date that MIT regular decisions are released. I agreed, because I never know what’s good for me. Then I forgot all about it.
Monday, Feb. 2nd to Saturday, Feb. 7
The Dawn of a New Project That is Not Good for My Academic Wellbeing
Near the end of IAP, this email thread was revitalized, and after the briefest thought, I pitched an idea: What if we made 30 pies for the class of 2030, each themed around a different aspect of MIT? Ceri loved it, and I was extremely optimistic about how little time this project would take. We scheduled a call with Jebby (blogger captain) and Sam (neither blogger nor admissions officer, but some secret other thing), discussing timelines and deadlines and budgets. I left the call fairly scared, and immediately started working on a large spreadsheet.
My experience as a JC at Mathcamp was about to come in handy—although at first glance, the project looked like a mountain of baking, it was secretly just a bunch of logistics. Thankfully, I eat that stuff up. First, a timeline. I made a calendar, filling it with self imposed deadlines, setting the baking dates and working backwards to figure out when I would need to finalize a list of pies, select ingredients, and find volunteers.
Then, I needed pie ideas. I wanted one for each dorm, mostly because I was suddenly obsessed with somehow making a Simmons ballpit pie.
After that, I was a bit stuck. Should I try to represent all the courses? Should I mash all the orchestral groups into one, or just focus on a few? To delay the inevitable need to make a decision, I drafted up a dormspam calling for my classmates to pitch their own ideas. Over Saturday brunch, Jebby and I discussed which ideas would make the cut. We reduced the course pies to just two—HASS and technical—and we opted to prioritize student-requested clubs over broader categories of pie.
Sunday, Feb. 8 to Friday, Feb. 13
After a weekend of brutal homework, I sat down to draw concept art for the pies. Five hours straight on my bed, filling circles with crust designs and colorful flavors, notating fillings and specs and what food paint was needed. The project had barely started, but I was already behind schedule—Sam had requested a shopping list for Monday, and it was now a couple hours after the end of Sunday. I still had no idea how I’d store and move pie ingredients (my best plan at the time was to use the admissions fridge, 20 minutes away from Simmons). I had baked like two pies in my life, ever. Morale was low.
the pie concept art!
Relief came in the form of Next Bake. While struggling to make a design befitting Next House, I recalled hearing about this club at MIT’s annual apple picking trip. I sent a plea in the Next Sing Discord, and was soon connected with Ali, Next Bake’s president. Ali was a godsend. After some logistics talk, she was able to reserve two full size fridges and pledge her army to the cause. That night, I closed my eyes and dreamt only of pies.
I woke up early Monday morning to pick out recipes for each pie, extract the ingredients needed, and compile a final shopping list. By this time, my spreadsheet was four tabs deep. Next, I dormspammed to recruit volunteer bakers. Notably, this email read as much less sane than the previous one. In fact they only got worse as time went on.
In all, I recruited about 30 bakers, and they all wanted to bake different pies that fit with their different schedules. To figure out good times for each pie, I made a when2meet and impersonated each volunteer, filling out their availability according to what they specified in the form. Now, when I try to sign into a when2meet, I see the history of all the people I pretended to be that week. A new tab, the baking schedule, was added to the spreadsheet. I also created a public spreadsheet that contained the ingredients and recipes, concept art, and a pie tracker.
Saturday, Feb. 14
My life feels like a Jack London novel for a few hours
Baking would take place on Feb. 15 and 16, on a Sunday and Monday of a long weekend. Before that, I would need to transport all the ingredients that Sam had delivered to Simmons over to the Next House fridges and take an inventory. This took over three hours on Saturday, and probably around 16 trips across Briggs Field, shin-deep in snow. I listened to Emma by Jane Austen as I trekked. I guided myself across the barren wastes via a track of footprints left by some brave explorer, and over many iterations, I managed to flatten the path into something pretty walkable.
During this period of my life, I understood what snow-blindness felt like—having the entirety of your vision filled with bright, stark white is extremely disorienting. I sometimes had to sit down in the snow and close my eyes to get myself grounded again. My heart would not stop pounding. I also became very good at holding large, heavy bags (using the handles is a fool’s move, you’ll be unbalanced and the bag will hit your legs every step. Hug the entire thing close to your chest instead.)
so much pie crust
The rest of the day, according to my Google calendar, was spent doing homework. I’m pretty sure I did not finish much.
Sunday, Feb. 15
This blog is like a recipe that has a thousand words of context before it actually gets to the baking part
Next Bake started work at 9 am. I showed up late, and by the time I was there, they had already gotten halfway through making blueberry filing. I got to work cutting out crust decorations for the pies that were quickly getting oven-ready. The Video Game Orchestra (VGO) pie in particular was a fun challenge, as it consisted of three fillings, all requiring different bake times. Ali ended up taking the pie in and out of the oven a few times, pouring in new fillings each time. Meanwhile, I worked on cutting out the VGO logo and Hornet Silksong for the top. This created one of the most technically difficult pies, and also one of the prettiest (in my biased opinion)
Also that morning was the Random Hall milk pie, whose recipe included “finish filling pie with milk”. Horrifying. It took over three hours in the oven to solidify into something that didn’t…slosh. After that unnerving endeavor, I had to dip out for two hours of VGO rehearsal.
unnerving…
When I got back, they had finished making ALL THEIR PIES. That’s FIFTEEN PIES (plus two for Next Bakers to eat as a treat) in seven hours. I was blown away and a little scared. As part of cleanup, we covered all our crust scraps with cinnamon and honey and baked them in a tray, then dipped them in the copious meringue we had left over.
That evening, I returned to Simmons to bake with some friends there. There, we made possibly my favorite pie of the whole endeavor. After all my plotting for how to represent the Simmons ballpit, I settled on rainbow tapioca pearls. The package was half white pearls, so we sorted out all the colorful pearls, cooked them, and filled the top of the pie with them. On the way up the elevator, we got no less than three compliments on the pie.
Monday, Feb. 16
In which I feel like some sort of vesicle or maybe a carrier pigeon
This was when the real chaos started. Today, we had pies baking in Simmons, New, BC, MacGregor, and EC, which made most of my day running around delivering supplies. We started with the MIT pie, and halfway through, I left to deliver supplies to New House. As we were working on the HASS and Academics pies back at Simmons, I got a text from Grace, one of the New House bakers: the chocolate filling was refusing to solidify. As I started attempting to remotely troubleshoot, I got another text. Apparently, almost immediately after asking me for help, the chocolate filling started behaving. I think I scared it. Around then, Andy, who was making a bundt cake apple pie for Tech Squares, came around to do some decorating. It’s easy to miss for non square-dancers, but a cute touch was the eight strawberries, which represent a squared set :)
By now, the Simmons bakers had started working on art for the Academics pie, which required a drawing for nearly every course. I left them to it and headed to Next to gather supplies for the BC pie. We ended up baking in the B1 kitchen, even though none of the BC bakers lived there, but whatever! This pie was also technically very intense, with many different fillings, but everyone set to work like naturals. After hanging out for a while, it was time for me to go back to Next again to gather supplies for EC. At this point, I called my Simmons friends to check up on their pies…and learned that, three hours later, the Academics pie was just now getting into the oven. Apparently, it was really hard to decide what symbol to draw for each course.
hatsune miku meringue for the BC pie
It turns out that walking to EC laden with two heavy bags takes a while. I made the handoff to Stickman, the floor that would be making the EC pie and two others, and hurried back to work on painting pies in Next with my roommate Anoushka. We could not get the edible markers to stick on eggwashed crusts at all, so instead we dipped our fingers in food coloring and fingerpainted most of the pies instead. I had violently blue fingers for about a week after. Thankfully, Anoushka managed to get her hands back to approximately skin in time for her very serious and professional conference.
My last stop for the night was MacGregor, where Nasya and I did some highly experimental baking, featuring red food coloring, pudding, Lego brick gummies, and one Duplo brick. I will spare the details and just show some pictures.
The last pie to “bake” was the makerspace pie. Originally, I had planned for more non-edible pie, including one made in the Glass Lab, but unfortunately those plans fell through. I didn’t have the time or supplies to make an extra edible pie though, so I continued with the single inedible pie. Thankfully, Perry was able to 3D print a pie crust overnight for me.
Tuesday, Feb. 17
Somehow, my emails get even worse in this part!
Tuesday was the day of the party. Specifically, the party would be at 2:30pm in Stud. The night before, I sent out a dormspam to advertise the party, and the morning of, I headed out to the admissions office to steal their big cart, and then to EC to retrieve the pies they baked yesterday. Then, I headed to class. During class, I made a to-do list while freaking out and learning nothing. I also made a slideshow of all the pies before realizing I wouldn’t have access to the TV.
Speedwalking back from class, I picked up a sandwich Liong got me and set to work hitting up the Simmons crafts lounge and EE makerspace, dumping random maker ingredients into the 3D-printed pie. I then loaded up the cart with the pies stored in my personal fridge, and rolled on over to Next House. There, I gathered more pies, for a total of 17 precariously packed pies in the two levels of the cart.
I soon learned that sidewalks are BUMPY. The pies rattled like they were at the epicenter of an earthquake. Another fun fact I learned while trying to solve the optimization problem of speed vs. bumpiness: For a long stretch of sidewalk down dorm row, every third seam between the concrete slabs is bumpy, while the other two are smooth. I noticed this when the sounds of tortured pies suddenly became strangely regular. New Vassar’s pie did not make the maiden voyage intact.
Despite my to-do list optimistically hoping for all supplies being at stud by 2, I had only brought over half the pies by that time. At this point, things were getting desperate. I frantically got Cyan and Steph, who are truly angels, to make pie signs while I raced back to Next for the remaining pies. In my pie-induced haze, I mostly focused on how the cart’s vibrations made the crumbs gather in two distinct spots, one on each level of the cart. That was cool. While waiting for the elevator, I sent out possibly my best dormspam ever. Then, I make the bumpy bumpy trek back. At this point, my hands are nothing but tingles. My timbers were thoroughly shivered.
this email was featured in a victorpost
By the time I got back to the Stud, a crowd had gathered. We set out the rest of the pies, and I, still frantic, assigned some of my innocent bystander friends to become photographers. Eventually, Stu and I made our way to the front, and I blabbed about the project, and named all the people who helped, and forced Stu into his own impromptu speech, and he cut into the MIT pie. With that, the party began, and I made myself relax and just have pie.
Some pies were extremely popular. I recall the chocolate New House pie and the pecan Baker Pie disappearing first. The milk pie turned out, in my opinion, surprisingly well, tasting somewhat like flan. The tapioca pearls on the Simmons pie were somewhat hardened, but the texture was weirdly appeasing.
i am exhausted in this photo
In all, the party lasted about an hour, far longer than I thought it would have. We took about another hour for cleanup, with groups of stragglers coming in every five or ten minutes for a slice or two. When we finally left, we had fragments of pie that totalled about four full pies. I declined to push the cart back on account of my hands’ health. Some dish cleaning and Tupperware returning later, and it was all over.
Wednesday, Feb. 18 to Friday, Mar. 6
Ok I lied it was not all over
A few days later, I was up til a truly embarrassing hour writing and editing photos for the blog. Over the next few weeks, I met with Petey and Ceri and Sam, rewriting and editing and making puns until we formed the blog that surfaced onto the admissions site a month ago. I also had to catch up on my schoolwork. We ended up making edits until the morning before the post dropped. It was crazy and volatile, but it happened.
I am so proud of this project. It is exactly the kind of crazy, large-scale, joy-sparking feat I dreamed of pulling off since even before MIT. I think it gave me confidence in my ability to tackle so much this semester—I’ve been (overly) optimistic with how much homework I can do in a given amount of time, which I blame on the insane Next Bake speedrun. Plus, knowing that I could dedicate what amounted to about 40 hours to non-schoolwork and still come out fine? So empowering. And that’s what I love so much about MIT. This is the place where you can learn to glassblow, or get money to run Bad Ideas, or build almost anything. This is the place where you can bake thirty pies in two days and have all the support in the world while doing it.