Every baked good tastes better with a backstory.

And there could be no sweeter illustration of this than at a totally sweet event held at CakeSpy Shop this week for Pi(e) Day on March 14: Seattle's first Pie Slam!

What is a Pie Slam, you ask? Think: Poetry Slam Meets Pie, and you're getting the idea. In this case, we opened it up to stories in addition to poems, but the basic idea was that each entrant would bake a pie, write a story about it, and present it to a crew of expert judges, who would then rate them on their story and pie, and ultimately come up with a winner.

The judges were like a who's who of the Seattle arts and food scene, including (from left to right) Dani Cone of High 5 Pie (and yes, her shirt says "Butter"), Kate Lebo of Good Egg, Nancy Guppy of ArtZone, Wendy Sykes of Four and 20 Blackbirds, and yours truly (not pictured).

As a judge, I had to try every pie.

I took this job very seriously.

The nine entries, which will be individually profiled on this site in the coming week (with recipes in some cases!), were very eclectic, but all very delicious, including a chocolate cream pie with macadamia brittle, a Shaker Lemon pie, a pumpkin pie in a graham crust, a Pake (pie in a cake), a "Lunchbox Pie" which included peanut butter, banana, and chocolate covered potato chips, a fig-apple-walnut pie, a blueberry pie, and two delicious apple pies.

The stories were equally eclectic, ranging from heartfelt elegies to love stories to college dorm memories to humorous anecdotes about pie versus cake battles.

Happy organizers, Wendy Sykes and CakeSpy-JessieIt was a tough competition: when the scores were tallied, it literally came to several half-point differences in score--it was that close!

But ultimately Kate McDermott's tale and Shaker Lemon Pie took the cake (er, pie?) and she won a totally sweet ribbon as well as an original CakeSpy painting; Alexander's Pake and humorous pie-versus-cake story took second prize, and he received a handmade mitt made by Wendy!