In this era of salty sweets, I’ve always thought Frito Pie was a dessert. I later found out that the delightfully trashy Southern specialty is more of a chili-cheese casserole with Fritos on the bottom. But I couldn’t get away from the idea of making a Frito crust for a sweet filling, and the Super Bowl this weekend was the perfect excuse to test it out. Using F&W’s Melissa Rubel Jacobson’s fantastic Chocolate Cream Pie recipe as a guide, I subbed in Fritos for the cookies in the crust. Sweet/salty nirvana? Almost. My Frito crumbs, crushed by a wine bottle since I don’t own a food processor, were a bit too big and became a little soggy in the fridge. As soon as my kitchen is stocked with a food processor, I'm trying this pie again.

For anyone looking for a sweet worth mail-ordering for Valentine’s Day, or any day, B.Hall Baker’s new mini whoopie pies are now available online. Washington, DC-based Beryl Hall, a former Hill staffer, keeps the calories low by keeping the pies small (she bakes them in madeleine molds). She gives her red velvet pies a rich tang (and a vibrant red color) with raspberry juice, raspberry extract and powdered raspberries from France. “Whoopie pies are a Yankee thing, but I’m trying to make them Southern,” the San Antonio native says, so this spring she’ll release coconut-cake and bananas Foster versions.

 

I’m a compulsive researcher when I travel, so about two weeks before I flew to London I e-mailed my plugged-in chef, design and wine friends there to find out where I absolutely had to eat. Princi was at the top of everyone’s list. This chic Milanese bakery chain from prolific restaurateur Alan Yau and baker Rocco Princi (often called the Armani of bread) recently opened its first international branch on Wardour Street. Princi is like the Italian version of Belgium's Le Pain Quotidien, with a minimalist-chic interior designed by Claudio Silvestrin (the creative mind behind the design of Georgio Armani stores and the Museum of contemporary art in Turin). Like LPQ, the focus in on insanely delicious baked goods, like buttery brioches and slightly chewy, olive-studded breadsticks. Thick squares of focaccia-style pizzas, such as zucchini with parmesan and egg, get warmed up in the wood-fired oven. There's also a full bar. I'm a firm believer that a city can never have too many fantastic bakeries, so I'm hoping Princi starts to pop up around the world, just like LPQ has.

Cookies for Kids’ Cancer, an organization that raises money to fund pediatric cancer research, will set up four bake sales around midtown Manhattan tomorrow afternoon. The Glad Products Company (if you watch Top Chef, you might have heard of them) will be matching all funds raised this month and next month up to $100,000. If you can’t make it to the sales tomorrow, you can host your own. Register here and get a free starter kit that includes recipes, plus Gladware and Oxo products. Food & Wine will be baking cookies for a sale next week, but until then, I plan to get my chocolate-chip fix at one of the sales tomorrow:

Rockefeller Center: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the south side of West 50th Street, between 5th Avenue & Rockefeller Plaza

Bryant Park: 1 to 2 p.m. on the west side of Sixth Avenue, between 40th & 41st Streets

Times Square: 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. on the south side of West 44th Street, between Broadway & Eighth Avenue

Grand Central Station: 4 to 5 p.m. on the west side of Vanderbilt Avenue, between 42nd & 43rd Streets

Craving cookies? Try one of these great recipes.

F&W's testing kitchen assistant, Brian Malik, spent last week baking cakes for a January story. Here, he reports:

For an upcoming story on bakeware, F&W's awesome food intern Molly and I worked our ovens overtime making yellow cakes, 14 in all, to test different baking pans. It’s amazing how different the cakes turned out in each pan, even though we used the same recipe every time. Some were light and spongy, others were dark and crisp, and in one, the cake overflowed, covering the oven floor with a sticky burned mess. The full results will be in a future article, but until then, use your favorite cake pan for these amazing recipes:

Yellow Cake with Vanilla Frosting

Marble Cake with Chocolate-Buttercream Frosting

In the prime upper-right-hand quadrant of New York magazine's always awesome Approval Matrix this week: A super-adorable do-it-yourself lunch bag from Design*Sponge. Full details of the project, including a template and easy-to-follow instructions, can be found here. Here, F&W provides 10 great ideas on how to fill it, including Indian pulled-chicken sandwiches, meat loaf club sandwiches and nutty apple pie bars (pictured).

Last week, I was up in Boston to help host a party with rock-star chef Barbara Lynch and the founders of Fresh beauty, Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg. The occasion: To celebrate an article in F& W’s September issue, in which Lynch helped her friends add more flavor to their favorite healthy recipes.

After the party, we headed over to Sportello, one of Barbara's newest restaurants, and the dinner conversation veered to keeping fit. Barbara is on a serious health kick. To keep up her energy (she just finished a new cookbook, Stir, out next month), she’s been obsessively juicing every fruit, vegetable and herb she can get her hands and storing batches in her fridge. Lynch also told me about her new favorite energy bar, Green Vibrance. (Cameron Diaz has been in Boston, filming Wichita with Tom Cruise, and her personal assistant introduced Barbara to the dark-chocolate-covered, vitamin-loaded veggie bar.)

In addition to trail-running with the Sportello staff, Barbara has also taken up boxing. And I don’t mean the cardio-punch classes they offer at fancy fitness centers. Lynch works out at Golden Gloves champion Peter Welch’s super-old-school gym in Southie. After a few drinks, Lev (he actually does the cardio-punch gym classes) and I had agreed to join her in the ring the next day. Lev was a no-show (I think he got scared), but Barbara’s publicist, Sarah Hearn, joined me for an intense hour-long session with a group that looked straight out of Rocky. After throwing uppercuts, jabs and hooks and doing what seemed like endless push-ups, I have a new respect for Barbara Lynch, way beyond her extraordinary skills in the kitchen.

 

In our October issue, we preview new baking books out this fall that celebrate easy American desserts. Here, we offer 10 new ideas for the all-American apple pie, like a double-crust version, flaky apple crostatas (pictured), and crispy apple dumplings made with frozen puff-pastry sheets. More Excellent Desserts: 10 superb American desserts, like minty baked Alaska and red velvet cake with caramel-coated pecans

If you've ever wondered what wine would be best with red velvet or chocolate cupcakes, James Roth of the wine shop Red, White & Bleu in Falls Church, Virginia, is your man. His motto is, "If you can eat it, you can pair it." So the Falls Church News-Press put him up to the challenge of pairing eight different flavored cupcakes with wines. The results were fascinating-for example, a dark-chocolate ganache with an Argentinean Malbec. Try some cupcake pairings yourself with some of my favorite F&W recipes:

Strawberry Shortcake Cupcakes
Lemon Meringue Cupcakes
Devil's Food Cupcakes with Espresso Meringue
Angel Food Cupcakes with Raspberry Swirl
Double Dark Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Filling

Andrew Sessa, senior editor at F&W's sister magazine Departures, is adamant that the mini Bundt cake is going to steal the cupcake's role as the darling of the dessert world. "People like cupcakes because they're cute, and individual sized, and, maybe most importantly, vaguely nostalgic," says Sessa. "They're a throwback to mom's kitchen, and mid-century Donna Reed Americana. Mini bundts hit all the same notes, and I think, are even cuter and certainly have an even stronger sense of that nostalgia."T he recreational baker adores the adorable round cakes so much that he has started his own company— Bundt, a Bakery  — which debuted last weekend at Brooklyn’s new Greenpoint Food Market. Sessa will be selling a rotating selection of seasonally inspired mini Bundt cakes, like Guinness Ginger Spice and Oatmeal Cranberry Crunch, for $4 each. The best-seller over the weekend was the zingy Caipirinha Sling. I couldn’t get enough of the supermoist Carrot Cake Bundt, which can be ordered with an extra shot of white chocolate–cream cheese buttercream frosting for $1 more.