Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some sweet tea. He's a Southern boy by birth (Brooklynian by marriage), and having a big ol' pitcher easily grabbable in the fridge seems to right any Mason Dixon imbalance he might be suffering at the time. I've got it down to a science, proportion-wise, but this past weekend, his itch for a sugar fix kicked in while I was at the grocery store. What he made tasted divine, but there was just too much for one pitcher, and not enough refrigerator room for a second.

If nothing else, the nuns at St. Scorpacciata instilled in me the mortal fear of wasting food, and seeing how I'd been at the store to buy milk (which neither of us usually drink) for a Bolognese, I decided sherbet would be what saved our souls from eternal damnation. I suppose we won't know for a while if that worked, but it did taste pretty damned delicious.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that E from Foodaphilia had teamed up with Nick the Peanut Butter Boy and Kristina from The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery to create the first ever Peanut Butter Exhibition. They asked their readers to put on their thinking caps and send in recipes and pictures of the best of their peanut butter baked goods. They had 16 entries and while all the recipes sound delicious, they managed to determine winners for the first, second and third places. However, there are no losers, as how can you lose when you have a pile of peanut butter confections at the end of the day?

The three top recipes are, HolyCrapTheseAreAmazing Cookies by Susan from Susan at Sticky Gooey Creamy Chewy, Peanut Butter Cookies Loaded for Bear from Ferdzy at Seasonal Ontario Food and Exotic Spiced Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies from Dee at Choos & Chews. A complete list of recipe names and links (brazenly stolen from Foodaphilia)is after the jump.

For a Super Bowl party, or any party where people will be milling around, standing, sitting, and perhaps even jumping around and screaming at the TV, it's probably a good idea to serve desserts that don't require plates and utensils. Cupcakes are a natural choice, and these Football Field Cupcakes from Family Fun are perfect for the Super Bowl.

The recipe isn't for cupcakes, as it assumes you already have a cooled cupcake. The recipe is more for the decorated cupcake. You cut fruit leather into the shape of a pennant, attach it to a pretzel stick as a flagpole, and make footballs out of almonds dipped in chocolate. Of course, you can make chocolate-only footballs like me, but they require a little more sculpting work.

Brilliant!

Up until yesterday afternoon, my boyfriend and I didn't have much of a New Year's Eve plan. There were options, a couple of different friends were having parties, one of my favorite bars in the whole world was having a no coverage charge evening and some friends had invited us over for pizza (sadly, I didn't actually get the text message with that invite until after we ordered take out sushi), but no hard and fast plan.

While we were having lunch at Marathon Grill at around 3 pm, we stumbled upon what became an integral part of the plan: brownie sundaes. With that idea in place, we ran to the store for ingredients. However, when we got back to my place and I started looking at recipes, I discovered that I had forgotten to by any unsweetened chocolate and I was fresh out (I've been away for two weeks and my memory of my supply inventory has gotten foggy). However, I had a bunch of bittersweet chocolate, some semi-sweet chips and unsweetened cocoa powder and decided to improvise based on a recipe for Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies from The Gourmet Cookbook (the big yellow one).

The batter was amazing tasting and so I had high hopes for the brownies. And they were good, but not as amazing as I wanted them to be. However, with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream, they were definitely doable. However, they worked some alchemy last night and when I woke up this morning, they had become the brownies I had hoped for--dense, fudgy and transcendentally chocolate-y. They are worth making, especially if you are able to let them rest for 12-24 hours before digging in.

If you're heading out on the town for New Year's Eve, well go ahead, get dolled up and ignore this post. This one is for those of us who will be doing the razzling and dazzling at home (in the kitchen, of course).

All you need is a little 151-proof rum, a lighter, and no fear of burning off those gorgeously groomed eyebrows. For whatever dessert you plan to set ablaze, set it in the middle of a dish with a slight rim around the edge to hold the liquor. Set the dessert -- in the picture above, it's a brownie that has been cut with scalloped biscuit cutter and a small scoop of vanilla ice cream -- on the plate where you plan to ignite it. Don't even think about lighting it up in the kitchen and walking out to the dining room with an open fire.

Pour about a ½ ounce of the liquor around the dessert. Once you *breathe in, breathe out*, light a match, set it to the edge of the liquid, and watch the flames soar. It takes about 1 minute for the flames to die down and the plate is left with a warm dessert.

As Bob posted earlier, today is National Oatmeal Day. I've always been been a huge fan of oats, give me steel cut, quick cooking or even instant in a pinch, I love the stuff. During the days when I was eating wheat free and was living at home, I'd often use my mom's Vita-Mix to whip up a little oat flour to use in place of all-purpose.

One thing people don't often think about as a way to use oats is in pie, but if you've never had Oatmeal Pie, then you are really missing out. It brings together the best parts of an oatmeal cookie and lands in smack dab in the middle of a pie crust (and how could that be bad?). After the jump you'll find my favorite recipe for this particular dessert concoction, chosen particularly because it uses maple syrup instead of corn syrup, as after watching King Corn, I'm trying to get the high fructose stuff out of my life.

When I hear "tarte tatin," naturally I think of an apple dessert. However, in a recipe by Regina Schrambling that was originally published in 2003 and just re-printed in this past Wednesday's LA Times Food section, tarte tatin goes savory. Not only does it go savory, but the inverted tart uses pumpkin to create an appetizer (or meal, if you add some other dishes). If you're having a Halloween-themed dinner party and want to keep it more adult, i.e. staying away from orange food coloring and gelatin-molded brains, the Pumpkin Tarte Tatin is a great addition to the menu. Basically, you place wedges of sugar pumpkin in the bottom of a skillet, sprinkle with goat cheese, cover with pie crust (of puff pastry), bake, then invert onto a plate to serve.

The full recipe is available at LA Times.

Wow.

When I saw these, all I could say (in my head, of course) was "Wow."

Though this may look like a very cute gang of B-boys, hip hoppy guys who breakdance, these are cupcakes. Su-yin, located in Australia, made these as birthday cupcakes in honor of a friend. The detail with the heads wrapped up in 'do-rags, caps, and even the Kangol hat is great, but I love the darling look of the faces. The faces are so adorable, I know for sure I wouldn't be able to take a bite (though she has pictures on her post of a half-eaten face).

In case some of you aren't aware, super mega store Target has its own line of grocery store products, Archer Farms. If you think about it, Archer Farms is just a fancy rooster sticker on the generic white store brand, but that is beside the point. The point is that though I knew about Archer Farms, and though I go to Target on a regular basis for "stuff," I never actually stopped to try any of their foods. The only thing I ever eat from Target is pizza from Pizza Hut because really now, I could never, in good conscience, eat Pizza Hut outside of a discount superstore.

This week, my Slashfoodie friends, it is "Sarah Tries a Lot of Foods From Target and Blogs About It!" Week because I somehow found myself with all kinds of "rare and wondrous foods" from Archer Farms ("rare and wondrous" are their words, not mine) in my pantry and my countertop.

First up, it's the Chocolate Chip Petite Cookies -- "rare and wondrous" indeed!

If you are looking for some Red, White, and Blue dessert ideas for the Fourth of July this year and haven't come up with anything yet, you may want to check out Better Homes and Gardens. They have a slideshow of 15 different choices for you to choose from including meringues (shown), parfaits, shortcakes, tarts, custards and even berry nachos. Granted, most of them include blueberries, strawberries and other assorted fruit, but that is not too surprising considering the season and the requisite colors of the holiday.

If you have created a red, white, and (or) blue dessert that you'd like to share, feel free to send us the link and we will spotlight them over the coming week.

The chips and salsa are long gone. The burgers too. The very last of the potato salad has been scraped from the bowl. I guess that means it's time for dessert!

Fresh fruit is a natural choice as dessert for a BBQ or any other type of outdoor entertaining during the summer, but serving it as a pavlova makes it about 100 times more special. The beauty of course, is that it looks like you went to quite a bit of effort to put one together, when in reality, it takes nothing at all. The pavlova shell is merely a meringue -- egg whites and sugar. Make the pavlova, then use your imagination to fill it or top it.

Sam Breach writes on her food blog, Becks n Posh, and while I love reading her charming stories about her adventures in and around San Francisco, what always gets me about her blog is her photography. How gorgeous is this photo?

The Pavlova has a tan, yes, and while purists might argue that it should be white, Sam made these with brown sugar, topped them with whipped cream, the first cherries of the late spring season, and caramelized almonds. I really do love the light brown color of the pavlova, making it so much softer looking with the cream and cherries!

It's too bad Frank DeCaro isn't on The Daily Show anymore. I miss his movie reviews and other commentaries.

But he has a web site, and it's not just another star site with the latest news about what he's up to, he actually has a really extensive list of recipes from celebrities! It's really well done, because you can search by the week, by the name, even by the type of meal it is.

You can make Paul Lynde's Diet Waffles, Andy Warhol's Ghoulish Ghoulash Stuffed Cabbage, and even Burt Reynold's Beef Stew. Or maybe you'd like Tony Randall's Crunchy Turkey Wraps or Vanna White's Layered Pea Salad or Moby's Pan Bagna. Whatever food you're in the mood for and/or celebrity you're interested in, there's something here for everyone. I'm going to try Richard Deacon's Bitter and Booze, which sounds like the ultimate booze dessert to drown your sorrows. Deacon wrote a microwave oven cookbook in the early 70s which I'll have to track down.

Few and far between are the people who don't like blondies at all. They have the thick chewiness that is usually associated with brownies, but are more substantial and often more satisfying. This batch of Toffee Crunch Blondies, baked by The Canadian Baker, looks to be even more satisfying than the average blondie because it incorporated chopped up Skor Bars into the blondie batter. The Skor bars melt into the blondies as they bake, creating little pockets of buttery toffee/caramel and chocolate, a nice change from the plain chocolate chips that are so often used in blondies. Alternatives to Skor include Daim, which you can usually find at Ikea stores or other importers and can be used in cakes and cookies, as well as in blondies, and chopped up Heath bars, which will add a similar flavor. The recipe for these blondies can be found here.

I can't believe that I'm thinking about ice cream when it is so chilly outside, but the flavor combination that Dagmar, from A Cat in the Kitchen, used in her Rhubarb and Caramelized Almond Semifreddo is very hard to resist. A semifreddo is an Italian term that literally means "partially frozen" and is often similar to a frozen custard or ice cream, although cakes and some fruit desserts can also fall under the term. Their distinguishing feature is that that are lighter than other frozen desserts. Unlike ice cream, whipped cream and/or egg whites are folded in before freezing and the dessert a mousse-like texture, but no churning is involved. They are often molded and sliced for serving.

This dessert has crunchy caramelized almonds and sweet, tender rhubarb in a vanilla base. One of my favorite things about this photo is the pink syrup. If you have ever cooked rhubarb, you will probably recall that it looses a bit of its pinkness during cooking or baking. You need to be extremely selective in the stalks you choose if you are going for color, since the greenish stalks will still have a good flavor, but will simply dull to a pale gold when heated.