Snickers Pie

My mom has a sweet (and much appreciated!) habit of mailing me surprise treats out of nowhere. Usually, they are related to cooking, like a recent box of olive oil from the farm we stayed at when we visited Italy. A few years ago it was a beautiful deep-dish pie pan and the book Pie by Ken Haedrich. 300 pie recipes. Seriously? I probably couldn’t think of more than 10 kinds of pie, let alone 300. But it is so much fun flipping through the book and seeing so many variations on classics along with some crazy new ideas. I’ve baked a few of them since I received the book but lately I’ve been pulling it out a lot. This is one I made a few weeks ago. Talk about indulgence! It was so rich I could barely eat a sliver at a time. Not to worry though. Jeff polished off about 1/2 of it in 2 days and, fearing what it would do to his stomach, I packaged up the rest and passed it to my brother (a college freshman). And that was the end of the snickers pie.

Butternut Squash Pasta Sauce

Even though I’m crunched for time this month, I’ve got all these food photos clogging upmy desktop, just begging me to write about them. So I’ll try to squeeze in a post every now and then. I’ll be back in full swing in April.

I really love the flavor of butternut squash, but the stringy texture sometimes bothers me. Because of this, I particularly like items that contain it in mashed or pureed form. We got lots of butternut squash from our winter CSA, which has been over since January (sniff-sniff) but will resume in April. Kind of like my life.

A Daring Baker’s Valentine

I had to skip the January DB challenge due to intense work-related projects that are still consuming every spare moment of my free time. However, I did manage to squeeze in the February challenge because it was a fairly quick challenge that I made as the dessert in our Valentine’s meal. It was also the perfect opportunity to pull out my 10 lb. bar of Guittard my mom so wisely gifted me at Christmas.

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

I chose to do raspberry champagne sorbet to go with the cake rather than the vanilla ice cream. A few years ago we had a flourless chocolate cake with some champagne sorbet at Bella Monica, a most delicious Italian restaurant tucked into a nondescript shopping center in Raleigh. I followed David Lebovitz’s recipe from The Perfect Scoop and it turned out, well, perfectly. It complemented the cake very well and was quite festive being red and full of champagne.

Below you’ll find the recipes for the cake and the sorbet. For other variations on the ice cream/sorbet component check out the creations of the other Daring Bakers.