Cyndi Lauper's Checkerboard Hair Pie

I know… having the word “hair” in the name of a pie just seems wrong. But, Cyndi Lauper’s 1980's multi-colored buzzed-on-one-side checkerboard hair is what inspired my pie.


Oh wait, let me back up a minute and explain this new blog event called “You Want Pies with That?”. Its in its second month and participants bake a pie that follows a theme. This month’s theme was chosen by Holly of Phe/MOM/enon. Holly chose "Pies as a Fashion Statement" as the theme. In Holly's words "I decided that the theme for November would be all about Fashionable Pies, Outrageous Pies, Colorful Pies, Pies with Texture, Pies that are Haute Cuisine as well as Haute Fashion, Pies that are Decked Out, Embellished, and Over the Top!"

Wow! That's a tall order.

My pie comes from a YouTube-sponsored trip down 80's memory lane.

Growing up in Wyoming in the 1970's, you couldn't help but lead a sheltered life. We listened to Top-40's on the radio because that was all there was. All of that changed, however, on August 1, 1981 with the debut of that life-altering new TV station...










MTV opened up a whole new world to me. All of this music, the hair, the clothes, things I had never seen or heard of! Remember Culture Club? When I realized that that shabbily dressed girl was actually a guy? OMG, I still remember being shocked.

Then there was Cyndi Lauper.


Oh, how I loved that girl!! With her wild, mismatched clothes, her day-glo makeup and ever changing hair. Cyndi showed us that it was OK to be different and that different was fun. And she could belt out a tune, that's for sure. I always dug her hair from the video Time after Time. Believe it or not, that hairstyle inspired my pie. Yellow and pinky red... cross hatch...


My original plan was a peach, raspberry, and rhubarb pie with a lattice top. Things were going swimmingly until I added the fruit to the pie pan and saw that my pie was only half full. D'oh!!


I don't know why I veered from my original plan at that point. I wish I would have stuck with peaches, raspberries, and rhubarb, but I didn't. For some reason, I added blueberries. When that still wasn't enough, I added blackberries.


Fortunately, it made for a deee-licious pie. Like triple-berry pie with peaches and rhubarb thrown in for good measure. Plus, the cream cheese pie crust got high marks too.


Look ma! No runny filling!


So there you go, my fashion inspired pie. Reminds me of the good ole' 80's when they actually played music videos on MTV (and remember they had VJ's?). If you're an 80's guy or girl, I know you want to listen to my favorite Cyndi Lauper song, True Colors.

Here is the recipe. Be forewarned, there are a lot of dirty dishes involved.

TRIPLE-BERRY RHUBARB PEACH PIE

Mix together:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar, light or dark
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon instant tapioca
1-1/2 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt

In one bowl, place:
3 cup frozen sliced peaches, thawed and drained of syrup
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Add half of the sugar mixture and toss, set aside.

In another bowl, place:
1-1/2 cup frozen rhubarb, cut into 1” pieces, thawed
1-1/2 cup frozen raspberries, thawed and drained of syrup

Add the other half of the sugar mixture and toss gently, set aside. My raspberries ended up basically liquefying after this, but it turned out OK.

You guessed it, in another bowl, gently toss until the berries are coated:
1-1/4 cup frozen blackberries, thawed and drained of syrup
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour

Finally, if you have any bowls left, add the following and gently toss until the berries are coated (or just use the blackberry bowl when you’re done with it, place the blueberries on top of the other fruit in the crust)
1 cup frozen blueberries, thawed and drained of syrup
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour

Roll out half of the pie dough (recipe below) and line a 9-inch Pyrex or other pie plate with the crust.

Alternately add spoonfuls of your different fruits to the crust. Don’t stir them together, you want them to be distinct. Keep adding until all fruit is in the crust. Dot the top of the fruit with:
1 tablespoon butter

Roll out the other half of your pie dough. Use a pizza cutter or pastry cutter to cut ½ to 1-inch strips from the dough.

Rather than trying to explain how to weave the lattice, I’ll direct you to a YouTube video that demonstrates how to do this part HERE. Once the lattice is woven, trim the edges evenly, and crimp the edges in whatever manner suits you. I used a fork.

Place the pie in the refrigerator to chill for a half hour.

Preheat oven to 375°F degrees.

Bake at 375°F degrees for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 350 degrees. I baked mine for about 25 minutes more, and then placed a metal pie shield around the edges to keep the edges from getting too brown. You could also line the edges with strips of aluminum foil. Bake for about 25 minutes more, or until golden brown AND the fruit is bubbling. My pie baked for about 60 minutes total.

Cream Cheese Pie Dough
(recipe from The Baker's Dozen Cookbook (which I highly recommend) and was contributed by Letty Flatt)

This recipe is easy. There's no ice water or cutting-in of butter or shortening involved.

1 cup unsalted butter
8 oz. cream cheese
2-1/2 teaspoons sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 cups all-purpose flour

Using a stand mixer, with a paddle attachment, mix the butter at medium speed until smooth, approximately for one minute. Add the cream cheese and mix until smooth and combined. Add sugar and salt and mix until incorporated. Add the flour and mix on low just until the flour is incorporated.

Dump the dough onto a clean surface and divide in two. Using a piece of wax paper over top, push each half of dough into a disk. Wrap the dough in the wax paper and refrigerate for one hour or overnight. If chilled overnight, let dough sit on counter for about 10 minutes before rolling out

September & October Recipe Roundup and Awards!

Whew! its' been a blogging marathon this week! Before I forget (like last month) I wanted to post my favorites for the month.

September was a good month for desserts. Lots of winners here! In fact, I had such a hard time deciding which was my favorite, there was a two way tie for first.

1. Chocolate Whopper Malted Drops
1. Creme Brulee
2. Pink Grapefruit sandwich cookies
3. Chocolate Chunkers
4. Peanut Butter Cookies

October was an interesting month... not as many home-runs, in my opinion, but a few stars shone through.

My favorites for October were:

1. Lenox Almond Biscotti
2. Lemon-Lime Meringue Tart
3. Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Operation Baking Gals, round three

Lastly, but definitely not least, a number of very sweet bakers have given me some awards. I can't tell you how much these please and humble me. To be thought of by talented and generous bakers really makes my day.

Lucy from sweets, savories, etc. has given me the Excellent Blog Award. Lucy recently posted her pizelle cookies, which seriously look like they belong in an art gallery. They're gorgeous! Thanks so much, Lucy!

Cathy at The Tortefeasor has given me the Kreativ Blogger Award. Cathy is so funny, she always makes me laugh and lightens my day. Thanks, Cathy!


Pamela from Cookies with Boys and Nancy at The Dogs Eat the Crumbs have given me the Premio Artey Pico award. Thanks so much, Pamela and Nancy! I love Pamela's often playful take on her food, and she's got some seriously adorable boys. Nancy always has such interesting discussions on her blog. I go there and come away having learned something new.



The Excellent Blog award, I'm giving to Heather at Cakes, Kids, and a Lens. Heather is an awesome cake decorator, a really nice person, and she makes a mean pot of jambalaya!
The rules for the award are:

Find 5 blogs, of any kind that you love to read.
Write a post about the blogs you picked, linking back to them.
Make sure you let them know you gave them an award.

The premio artey pico award, I'm giving to Rebecca at Ezra Pound Cake. Rebecca doesn't know this but she kept me on this side of insanity today with her timely post about PMS Wrangler cookies (a.k.a no-bake chocolate cookies).

The rules are:
This award was created in Uruguay by a fellow blogger who makes dolls exclusively from recycled materials. Her blog can be reached by clicking here. The rules for this award include the following:

Pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogger community, no matter of language. Advertise the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone. Each award-winner, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.
Award-winner and the one who has given the prize has to show the link of “Arte y pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.

The Kreativ Blogger award has a "meme" attached to this award, in the form of lists of sevens. OK, I am going to have to think about this one, LOL. So I will get back with the lucky recipient of this award. And my list... my brain is plumb tuckered out right now, so I will get back to this also.

Here is the list to be filled out by the recipients. If you want to give this a go, just let me know... LOL, I'll give you the award!

7 things I did before

7 things I do now

7 things I want to do

7 things that attract me about the opposite sex

7 Favorite Foods

7 things I Say Most Often:

7 Tags (and award too; pick one up)

Cookie Carnival: Mini Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

(Yes, that picture does have a nuclear glow to it, lol.)

I'm so glad I joined Cookie Carnival. If I could only bake one type of baked good for the rest of my life, it would be cookies. I love making them, and eating them. The cool think about Cookie Carnival is that it forces me to reach outside of my comfort zone and try new things.

Like sandwich cookies. This is my second sandwich cookie (the first being the surprisingly scrumptious Pink Grapefruit Sandwich Cookies). This time around it's chocolate cookies with pumpkin filling, also known as Mini Pumpkin Whoopie Pies.


I was curious about the origin of Whoopie Pies. According to Wikipedia: "A whoopie pie, sometimes alternatively called a gob, black-and-white, or bob is a baked good traditional to the Pennsylvania Dutch culture as well as New England, made of two small, chocolate, disk-shaped cakes with a sweet, creamy frosting sandwiched between them."

Interesting, since I thought the cookies tasted exactly like Devil's Food cake. (Ha, can't fool a cookie expert, trying to disguise a little round cake as a cookie!) I wasn't too keen on the filling. My tastebuds didn't think it went very well with the chocolate cookie. I think I would have liked them better with a fluffy white filling, as with the original.

Quite a few other Cookie Carnival bakers said their filling was runny. Mine wasn't runny, just kind of slimy-ish. I whipped the heck out of it with my Kitchenaid mixer, so maybe that's why it stayed together.


I enjoyed making them though. They're super cute and make for a nice take-along for the holidays feeding frenzies. I might try them again with a different filling. The cake/cookie was lip-smacking good.


If you'd like to give them a try, you can find the recipe at Martha Stewart's site.

Daring Bakers: Pizza

This month's Daring Bakers recipe was Pizza & Toppings and we were to show proof that we tossed the dough in the air. Thanks so much to Rosa of "Rosa's Yum Yums" for hosting this month's challenge. She chose the Pizza Napoletana from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. (Please stop by Rosa's site if you'd like to peek at the recipe.)


I made the full dough recipe, split it into four pieces, and froze two of them for later use. My pizza flavors were Skyline Chili Pizza and Chocolate Strawberry Pizza.

I would have to say the results were... well, let's just say I tried. When I got done baking my first crust, my son said "Mom, that's not pizza, that's Texas". Bless his pointed little head.

Sadly, he was right. I present to you, Texas, in pizza crust form...

Before I get into the gory details, let me just explain Skyline Chili real quick.


OK, this "chili" is a Cincinnati thing. There are other Cincinnati Chili chains, but Skyline is my favorite. Honestly, it's really more of a spaghetti dish. The first time I tasted it I was like "What the...?" It's a plate of spaghetti, topped by a meat sauce, and the whole sha-bang is topped with a MOUNTAIN of finely shredded (neon orange) cheddar cheese. The meat sauce has a real distinct taste. (You can take a look-see on the Skyline website.) It's totally habit forming and now I crave it! I don't know what the H they put in the stuff, but I can't get enough.

Aaaaanyway, back to the pizza. I thought it would be a fun experiment to make pizza with Skyline chili and some of that eerily orange cheese.

The second pizza, LOL, was my Sandra Lee-inspired dessert pizza. In true "Semi-Homemade" fashion, I popped open the Snack Packs, sliced some strawberries, and drizzled on the caramel sauce straight from the jar. It was quite tasty and I'm guessing Sandra would have approved.


The verdict? Well, it might be best for everyone involved if I stick to baking sweets.

My dough wasn't right. When I went to pick it up after refrigerating and letting it sit out for 2 hours, it just fell out of my hands, like water overflowing the sink. There was no way I could toss it. I had to ball it up and knead it together a bit before I could toss it. The taste and texture was just OK. I'm guessing I flubbed up somewhere because mine wasn't as awesome as those I've seen posted by others. Also, the chili was probably too wet because my savory pizza crust was undercooked even after 8 minutes. Live and learn, right?

I was able to toss the dough somewhat and my second crust actually ended up round rather than geography inspired.


So, there you go! If you're still with me... thanks. Feel free to stop by the other Daring Baker's sites to see how they fared.

P.S. I'm shamelessly pimping my giveaway, which is two posts below this one. Even if you don't want the book, I'd love to hear about your grade school years. :)

TWD: Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes

After 23 weeks in a row of baking along with the Tuesday's With Dorie gang, I've decided to take a vacation this week. I'm going to skip this week's recipe, Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes.

I baked about a bajillion cupcakes back in my cake-decorating days, and I just can't get excited about them anymore. That, and I've been extra busy this week.

I apologize to this week's host, Clara from I Heart Food 4 Thought. Please don't hate me, Clara! I'm sure they were delicious.

Since I'm bagging, I thought I'd at least share my favorite chocolate cupcakes and the recipe I use. I love the pink icing with white nonpareils against the deep, dark chocolate. They would be my favorite even without the decorations.


I made them to go with this Luis Vuitton purse cake.


For the LV logos on the cake, I used "icing sheets", which are very thin sheets of dried icing mounted on a plastic backing. Typically they are used in making edible images. I drew the logos on the icing sheets with edible markers (which took for-EV-er) and then applied the sheets to the freshly iced cake. The purse finishing details are made from fondant and the makeup pieces are made from white chocolate.

(Before I forget, if you'd like a chance to win a free cookbook, you can check out the post below this one.)

The recipe I use is a doctored cake mix. It comes from Rebecca Sutterby, a fantastic cake decorator located in Kansas. You can check out her award-winning cakes at Sugar Creations.

I halve the recipe for a batch of cupcakes. This recipe is moist and flavorful. Back in my cake decorating days I got so many comments along the lines of "this is the best cake I've ever had!". See the chocolate variation below.

White Almond Sour Cream Cake
From Rebecca (KS)

2 boxes white cake mix (I prefer Betty Crocker)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups granulated sugar
1 ½ tsp salt

2 2/3 cups water
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 tsp real vanilla
2 tsp almond extract
2 cups (16 oz) sour cream
8 large egg whites

Place all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and stir together with a wire whisk. Add the remaining ingredients and beat on a low speed for 2 minutes. Bake at 325 degrees until cake tests done.

This recipe makes:
One 14” round and one 6” round or
One 16” round or
One 12” round and one 10” round or
One 12 X 18” sheet cake or
One 12” round and one 8” round and one 6” round
Two 9" squares

Half the recipe makes:
Two 8” rounds or
Two 6” rounds and 6 cupcakes

Double the recipe makes:
one 18" round + one 10" round
all 4 sizes in the Wilton petal pan set

One fourth the recipe makes:
two 5" rounds

For chocolate cake: use chocolate mixes, omit almond extract and substitute 6 whole eggs for the whites.

For liqueur flavors: substitute alcohol (such as champagne or Kahlua) for about 1 cup of the water in the recipe

For berry flavors: use frozen berries, thaw reserving the juice. Substitute the berry juice for part of the water in the recipe, and stir the berries in at the end.

I'm giving something away!

You know you have too many cookbooks when you order one you already have. Yup! I did just that last week.

I am the proud of owner of two copies of "The Sweet Melissa Baking Book", and I want to give one to a lucky baker out there. I've found so many generous and sharing bakers since starting this blog and I'd like to give back to the baking community.


It's got a lot of fantastic sounding recipes. I have yet to make one but I have one earmarked as my inspiration for next month's pie recipe.

Since I am so enjoying watching my kids and all of their whacky grade school antics, I thought it would be fun to hear some of y'alls stories from when you were kids. Leave a comment to this post, and tell me one story or memory or favorite teacher or run in with the principal or first boyfriend or whatever from when you were in elementary school.

I'll close the giveaway in two weeks, on November 6, at midnight. By then I'll have figured out one of those random generator thingies and I'll use it to find the lucky winner.

Good luck!

TWD: Pumpkin Muffins

One great thing about pumpkin desserts is the color. That burnt orange color... love it!

This week's Tuesday's with Dorie recipe was Pumpkin Muffins, and was chosen by Kelly of "Sounding My Barbaric Gulp". Thanks Kelly! These lovely muffins have gotten me in the fall baking spirit.

My 9 year old took this picture. Don't they look great against the just-turning fall leaves?


A lot of folks said they loved these muffins. I don't know if it's my imagination or not, but it seemed like a lot of the folks that loved them added chocolate chips. Is that true? Anyone?

Personally, I thought they were a little bland. I did enjoy the crunch of the sunflower seeds on top, though. It was an interesting and tasty addition. I decided to up the yummy-factor by adding a healthy dollop of cream cheese icing to the muffins. They pretty much rocked after that. (Although I think it's quite possible that a burlap bag would taste delish with a dollop of cream cheese icing on top.)

I ended up with 12 muffins plus enough batter for a 2-inch mini cake.


Next week, we'll break out the muffin pans again for "Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes". See you then!