1276 pizzas and some treats

This month is by far the wildest month at Old Town Pizza.  As a "we love our customers!!" promotion we sell medium cheese and pepperoni pizzas for $5 every Wednesday through the entire month.  It becomes ridiculously busy.  RIDICULOUS.  In the days when I worked there, it was stressful but fun and we pumped out the pizzas until we ran out (usually earlier than our closing time).  Now it's more than ridiculous.  It's insanity.  From open to close the kitchen is filling the oven with pizzas without stopping.  They are machines: rolling out dough, saucing, cheesing, pepperoni-ing, cutting, boxing.  It doesn't stop until the dough runs out, and there are hundreds of pounds of dough.

This was the final week for this year and today's pizza total blows any previous record outta the water.  Twelve hundred seventy six pizzas.  Can you even imagine it?  It's insanity!!!!  Our employees work hard during this promotion.  They are pretty much amazing, keeping a jolly front when people start to get annoyed at ever expanding wait times and building pizzas with a vengeance.  So I pulled out a special recipe for them.  They are generally pretty spoiled with cookies from me anyways, but this one wasn't any ol' cookie.  It's chocolate upon chocolate built up around a peppermint patty, and the recipe is a bit high maintenance.  But this was for a good cause (according to some, I am trying to fatten them up) because I love them for keeping my hubby happily employed and me at home with our sweet Rosita (she's like, one sixteenth mexican).

I borrowed the recipe from a favorite food blog, Vanilla Sugar.  You can find it here: http://vanillakitchen.blogspot.com/2011/02/quarter-pound-double-chocolate-mint.html.

I say it's high maintenance because I had to grate nearly three sticks of butter.  It was super lame.  However, after the batter came together it was all fun and games.  The game pieces:

This ice cream scoop is probably my second favorite baking tool (my first is the electric mixer, can you imagine beating eggs into stiff peaks by hand?!), it makes all my cookies uniformly sized and makes people think I am some kind of baking genius.  Take two scoops of that gnarly chocolate batter and make a sinful little sandwich.

Then be a good girl (or boy) and follow the recipe's insistence that you seal the edges, even though you really want to cook them this way...just to see what happens!  (I would have, but I really needed all the cookies to come out nicely so there would be enough for the employees - boooorrrring!)

Next, feed the creature that is clinging to you so that she will go away and not get burned when you open the oven.  This creature enjoyed a peppermint patty.

Then- bake the suckas!  

If you are the milk slugging type, these absolutely require a glass of milk.  They are so, so decadent and fabulous.  No joke.  These are a special treat to be certain and if you make them you will not be disappointed, just maybe a bit annoyed while you grate butter.

I also threw together (HA!) a Tres Leches cake for the kitchen staff, and while I was making it I salivated all over myself.  Now I need to make one for me.  I didn't capture many shots of the process, just the "frosting".  It ain't really frosting, at least the way I define it.  It is spectacularly wonderful though.  So I turned my beaters on high in some cream, sugar, vanilla & almond extract (Shh!!  It's my secret ingredient!) and let'er rip.

And when the whine of the beaters in my ears got to be more than I could bear...it was done.

The transformation still gets me excited.  I mean, only a few minutes ago it was soupy, sloppy and certainly not spreadable.  Now it's a different creature all together!  Magical.  

So I spread it over my delicious cake, sprinkled on some cinnamon and BLAMO!  Tres Leches is in the bag.

The result is that my sink is fill of dirty dishes again and the clean ones haven't even been put away yet.  

Oh, and hopefully the OTP staff felt some love for all their efforts :)