"I Made This........155" We are trying to transition from a typical "bar" menu, to more of a quick casual restaurant menu, with the general theme being comfort with a twist. Or try comfort upscaled a bit. Currently, I buy our desserts from a baking company in Kansas City. The Peanut Butter Cup Cheesecake has proven to be quite popular, but I have to charge 4.50 for it, due to it's cost from the manufacturer. So, I have been attempting to come up with desserts that we can make ourselves, and charge less for. The hope here is that people might be more willing to order dessert if the additional cost to them is less. Upsell, upsell, upsell. The brownie idea has worked pretty well, so far. So I plan to do more variations of them. Not your ordinary brownie, something a bit more exotic, like the current Cinnamon-Chocolate Brownie, spiked with a bit of cayenne, and topped with homemade whipped cream. The brownie is offered regular, or "a la mode", with a scoop of ice cream on top, and almost all have sold with the ice cream. I saw this idea for a "pie", made with a crust of chocolate chip cookie dough, and filled with ice cream, and assorted toppings. I did not want to go the pie route, but I liked the concept. So...I decided to try making a chocolate chip cookie "cup", by forming the dough in oversized muffin tins. The first recipe I used was a disaster. This one worked out much better. It is the recipe found on the back of a bag of Hershey's semi-sweet chocolate chips at the grocery store. Filled with a big ol' scoop of vanilla ice cream, drizzled with chocolate syrup, a dollop of homemade whipped cream, and the ever so necessary marachino cherry. By the way, did you know they make these cherries by soaking regular cherries in a brine with bleach, that removes the original color, and then soak them in a sweetened brine containing red food colouring. Yep, it is true. Anyway, this is the prototype, completed today. Does not have an actual name yet. But the day shift and night shift ripped into them and scarfed it up like crazed sugar addicts, swearing it would sell well. So I think we'll give it a try next week on the specials sheet. It can be tough this time of year to guage the success of a dessert, as Catholics love to use giving up sweets as a Lent thing. But we will see.

From the bottom, Short crust pastry, cookie dough, frosting, ice cream, rainbow cake, more frosting with sprinkles! Oh my!