Day 119: Spaghetti Pie and Chocolate Dipped Cheesecake Lollipops
Let me clarify: chocolate-dipped cheesecake pops are not something I would typically make for dessert on a plain old Monday night. I made them for the Eyeopener because tomorrow I’m going to chat about food blogs. Thinking I’d choose a recipe from one of my favorite sites, I hopped around a few and found that Cream Puffs in Venice, Tartelette, and another blog I stumbled through were all posting cheesecake pops. As I was perusing them my friend S emailed from Whistler, where she is apparently hooked on something from the local chocolate shop called cheesecake bombs. I took this as an unmistakable sign that I should make some. What a hero I’m going to be in the studio tomorrow morning!
The pie was to make use of leftover spaghetti; I did a few segments debunking common cooking myths on BT this morning, and as a result had plenty of leftover cooked pasta that was used to demonstrate the myth that adding oil to the cooking water prevents it from sticking together. (It’s a large volume of water, kept at a rolling boil with space for the spaghetti to move around, that keeps it from sticking. In fact, adding oil to your water will result in an oil slick on your pasta once you drain it, and your sauce won’t stick very well.)
Spaghetti Pie.
I’ve seen many versions of spaghetti pie, some in which the pasta is tossed with the sauce and cheese, then baked, others that have the crust par-baked first to crisp it up, and others with layers of cottage cheese between the noodles and sauce.
So I improvised: tossed the leftover spaghetti with some egg white (I had some whose yolks had been used to make lemon curd), a bit of grated Parmesan, a grinding of pepper and a big spoonful of pesto, just because there was some open in the fridge and W is such a fan, then spread the spaghetti into an oiled pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit.
I had requests for spinach sauce, but had hastily crumbled and cooked a couple lean Italian sausages, a red pepper, a few fresh tomatoes that had gone too wrinkly for anything but cooking with and a can of tomatoes before remembering this, and pureed sausage, I imagine, is not a Good Thing. So I decided to proceed as if it were a lasagna - I crumbled some ricotta and thawed, squeezed-out spinach over the crust,
topped it with the sauce…
and some grated part-skim mozzarella, and baked it at 350F for about half an hour, until all was golden, crsipy-edged and bubbly. Yum.
The cheesecake pops were simple, really, mostly because I didn’t make the cheesecake from scratch like the others did. Some advised making a cheesecake and then scooping up balls of it with your hands, freezing them and then dipping the frozen wads in chocolate. Because I couldn’t envision blaspheming a cheesecake that way, nor attempting to cut one into teeny fancy shapes using a cookie cutter (too thick for any in my collection) I decided to buy one of those small plain frozen Safeway cheeesecakes and cut it into wedges. It worked perfectly.
After inserting the sticks (bamboo skewers, although popsicle sticks or the 4″ lollipop sticks you can buy at Michael’s would work brilliantly), I put them back in the freezer to solidify while I melted some chocolate chips in the microwave, then half dipped, half spread the melted chocolate onto the frozen wedges. Some sprinkles or other decoration would have worked out well, but I didn’t really have anything. That’s the beauty of radio; you don’t really need to accessorize.
April 28 2008 09:12 pm | cake and dessert and freezable and one dish and pasta and sweet stuff
Leslie on 29 Apr 2008 at 7:38 am #
Great site! I had to look it up after hearing you this morning.
This sort of thing used to be our kids’ favourite, too - although yours is much more imaginative. Kids are grown and gone, but we’re going to be parenting our little nephew for a few days next week. Thanks for the brilliant idea - we’ll browse your site for more things he might enjoy.
Keep the good things coming.
Dana on 29 Apr 2008 at 8:08 am #
Hey Julie,
The cheesecake lollies are the Daring Baker’s April Challenge. Each month we all make the same recipe and post on the same day. There were hundreds of bloggers (inlcuding me) making these cheesecake pops last month and we all posted on April 27th.
The recipe is from Jill O’Connor’s excellent book Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey.
Drop by my blog if you get a chance to see my version of the lollies.
Amanda on 29 Apr 2008 at 11:34 am #
Hey Julie, I’m warming up to the idea of spaghetti pie. At first I was little sickened, but then i thought about it like a kind of lasagna. Pasta slightly cooked and baked with cheese?! Sure, why not.
JulieVR on 29 Apr 2008 at 2:01 pm #
Yes, I made the Daring Bakers connection late last night after I posted to my blog… I thought it was a weird coincidence! Looks like I need to be a Daring Baker!
Dana on 30 Apr 2008 at 8:54 am #
You totally need to be a Daring Baker - it’s great fun!
dinner with Julie » Day 152: Leftover Spaghetti Pie and Lemon Bars on 30 May 2008 at 9:57 pm #
[…] was a snacking sort of afternoon, and Mike was going out tonight, so I pulled a container of spaghetti pie out of the freezer in order to feed W properly, and I snacked on some leftover lemon bars from a […]