In honor of Pi Day, I decided to make cutie pies… adorable little pies that are literally made out of Cuties California Clementines!

These California clementines are so sugary sweet that they can be eaten as candy.  Their size makes it easy to demolish a handful of them.  Luckily, you don’t have to feel bad about it!

Though I can’t recommend eating a handful of these miniature pies in one sitting, I can guarantee that you’ll want to!  Making clementine curd filling is very simple and took me about 15 minutes.

These treats are a refreshing update on the simple lemon tart.  While experimenting, I found that these cutie pies turned out a little too sweet when I used exclusively clementine juice to make the curd mixture.  To remedy this, I used half clementine and half lemon juice to add back the zing that many people associate with citrus pastries.

To make the pie crusts, I used left-over sablé tart dough that I brought home from pastry school.  Sablé means “sand” in French, and the crust crumbles apart with a sandy texture.  Any tart crust recipe will do the trick for these cutie pies though.

The time is now… whip up a cutie pie for your cutie pie!

Ingredients

1/4 cup clementine juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 3 large eggs, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 4 tablespoons of chopped unsalted butter, zest of two clementines, pinch of salt, tart or pie dough

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients excluding butter in a saucepan but do not put on the heat yet.  Whisk ingredients together until well incorporated.
2. Place on the heat and continue to whisk.  Stir constantly so that the eggs don’t cook and scramble.  Soon, the mixture will thicken.
3. When mixture thickens, add the butter.  Adjust heat to low.
4. Stir until the mixture no longer has lumps of butter and has a smooth consistency.
5. Strain mixture into a container and let chill in the fridge.
6. After the mixture has cooled, fill a piping bag and pipe the mixture evenly into chilled or room temperature tart shells.