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  It’s one of the sweetest dessert memories from my childhood in the 60s: My mom approaching a table full of friends and family with a glistening, midnight-blue pie in her hands. Everyone who knew Judy Gewertz knew her as a baker. Her brownies were legendary. Her carrot cake still inspires demands for the recipe. But her blueberry cream cheese pie wowed everyone the minute they saw it, and prompted moans o

I finally got mini pies into my repertoire! It took some experimenting, but I’m delighted with the result. Aren’t they adorable?   I’ve been making lots of bigger pies for years–the standard, round 9- and 10-inch ones, and even a few big rectangular “slab pies.” But all the while, I’ve been watching my fellow bakers churn out cute little individual pies. They’

Let’s get this straight right up front: No one’s fooled by the name. We all know Boston Cream Pie isn’t a pie. But it’s so yummy in its creamy, cakey chocolatiness that we had to go ahead and add it to the CurvyMama lineup. We decided to give it credit for its heritage: We figure that any cake that was originally baked in pie tins is kin enough to join our little pie family. Yes! Pie tins

It started last Christmas, with the realization that I couldn’t make it through winter without peppermint bark. You know peppermint bark, right? It’s that strangely addictive candy, hocked by Williams-Sonoma, Trader Joe’s, and other peddlers of sin: dark chocolate, layered with peppermint-infused white chocolate, and sprinkled with those red-and-white-striped peppermints, crushed into charming littl

Okay, I’ll say it right here and now: I resisted Key lime pie. I don’t know why. I was oddly biased against it. Maybe it was a couple of nasty slices I had the misfortune to try; slices with an oddly artificial lime taste. I dunno. But whatever the reason, I chose not to put Key lime pie on my menu. You can come trounce me now. Call me closed-minded. Call me insensitive to pie lovers everywhere,

Admit it: you love that supermarket eggnog that calls to you from the dairy case, right? CurvyMama freely admits that she loves it. But don’t think we’re strictly low-brow, either; we love the top-quality eggnog, too. So when December rolled around, our thoughts turned to eggnog… but in pie form. Yum! What a perfect pairing! (Big hat tip here to CurvyMama daughter #1, better known as Sweetie Pie

Every once in a while, I have the good luck to come up with a recipe that makes people melt into little pools of helpless joy the minute they take a bite. This is one of those recipes. No pie has gotten more rave reviews at my office than CurvyMama’s Crème Brûlée pie. And since my office is full of reporters with wonderful vocabularies, I heard quite a bit of well-phrased rapture about this pie. The contrast of

A bunch of my friends got into an animated discussion the other day on Facebook about buttermilk pie and chess pie. Many of us weren’t too familiar with these pies, hailing as we do from some place other than the South. So I decided that this was a great chance to do another CurvyMama Pies smackdown. If you’re not familiar with our smackdowns, you can calm yourself, because there is no violence involved.

In CurvyMama’s quest for the yummiest pie ever, she vowed to use the fruit-scarce winter months to perfect creamy custardy sorts of pies. As spring takes hold, she’s here to declare that she’s pretty darn satisfied with the results. The latest happiness emanates from this banana cream pie. The combination of crisp, flaky crust, just-barely-ripe bananas and a creamy custard makes me swoon. But becaus

CurvyMama’s pretty happy with her fine self at the moment. After months of dissatisfaction and tinkering, she’s come up with a kick-ass coconut cream pie. I always like it when I get to the happy place with a pie; that place where you pretty much know that you’ve got The Recipe. But it was especially important to me to get to that place with coconut cream. There was something of a genetic imperative