"sweets" news and stories

The perfect melding of sweet and salty, this pie will have your guests cheering for more, so you'd better make two, just in case.

Rocky Road Cookie Pizza
From: Pillsbury Cookies, Brownies, and Bars

You will need:

1 pkg. refrigerated sugar or chocolate chip cookies in log form (it's okay to use them, just this once!)
1/2 cup chopped salted peanuts
1 cup miniature marshmallows
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/3 cup caramel sauce

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 12-inch cookie sheet, and press the cookie dough onto the pan. Bake at 350 for 13-16 minutes until the "crust" is golden brown.

Remove the cookie from the oven and sprinkle evenly with peanuts, marshmallows, and chocolate chips. Drizzle with caramel sauce. Bake for another 5-10 minutes.

Cut into wedges and serve (if you're really daring, top your pizza with a dollop of whipped cream or caramel ice cream).

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!

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No matter where they grew up, it always seems that people have similar "ice cream man" stories. A lot of kids, my brother and I included, were convinced that their ice cream man has some sort of sinister alter ego, complete with an illegal job that no one could quite pinpoint. Ours, we decided, was a cocaine dealer, but yours might have spent his off time running numbers, dabbling in the mob, or laundering money, to name a few.

So despite this nose-numbing, toe-tingling, sniffle-inducing cold snap that most of us are experiencing right now, perhaps we can use our imaginations to conjure up some thoughts of warm days accented by the sounds of slightly off-key jingles wafting from the ice cream truck. You picturing it?

Good. Now, while you're in the mood, check out this gallery of unique ice cream trucks, and then leave us your ice cream man stories in the comments. (Speaking of which: did anyone's neighborhood have an ice cream woman?)

We first heard about Cacao Reserve chocolates, the new premium line from Hershey's, a couple of weeks ago. It is the first Hershey's-branded premium chocolate line, since up until this point, all of the gourmet products from the company have been produced by Scharffen Berger or Joseph Schmidt Confections, the two luxury chocolate brands that Hershey's acquired. Cacao Reserve is all-natural and, like so many other new chocolates, is categorized by cacao percentage, not just "milk" or "dark." They seem to carry the full line, although I did not see the "country of origin" bars (with beans from specific countries, at Target and I picked up a couple bars to try.

I suspect that there could be a whole Food Porn series devoted to the perfect cuteness that is exhibited by Leda's Cupcakes, especially the miniature ones. Daily Gluttony captured (and consumed, at least in part) this particular batch of them. The LA area cupcakery's mini cupcakes come in flavors that rotate daily, but are always filled with curd, ganache or creme and topped of with a generous amount of buttercream frosting and a little, retro-inspired candy. Since the photo above is an assortment, it probably includes flavors like Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate, Chocolate Chocolate White Chocolate, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Pumpkin (pumpkin cupcake with orange curd filling and vanilla buttercream), Lemon (vanilla cupcake with lemon curd and lemon buttercream), Dulce de Leche (vanilla cupcake with dulce de leche filling and dulce de leche buttercream), Carrot (carrot cupcake with an orange curd filling and mascarpone buttercream ) or Coconut Lime (coconut cupcake with lime curd filling and vanilla buttercream). While the cakes and the frostings are excellent, the real selling point for Leda's cakes is the curds, since so many other cupcake bakeries concentrate on the sprinkles without trying to improve the insides of the cupcakes themselves.

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