Patriotic Fruit Pizza

Patriotic Fruit Pizza

This weekend was full of uncharacteristically bad food. I'm hoping the fruit in this tricked my body into digesting this as a quasi-healthy dessert. Oh, and the best thing about this stuff is that it even though it looks really impressive, a first grader could make it; K-Dubs made this all the time when I was a kid, and she's really not much of a baker. And there's nothing weird in it, so it's a crowd-pleaser. The downside is that there are a lot of steps, so I recommend breaking it up into two parts like I did.

Anyway, let's make with the good stuff, shall we? First, the crust.

That's butter, granulated sugar, confectioners' sugar, eggs, orange peel, vanilla, baking powder, and salt.

First things first. Chuck three sticks of butter into a mixing bowl. I used white again, b/c it's the only huge bowl I have.

Add in about ½ Tbsp orange zest. This will NOT make your crust orange-flavored, I promise. Just gives it a little bit of flavor that works well with the fruit. You can buy orange peel in the spice aisle (I had it on hand b/c my orange cookies are often requested … more on that closer to Christmas), but you can also grate up an orange or lemon peel if you have fresh fruit handy. I'd personally rather rip off my own thumbs than peel and zest an orange, but if it works for you, go for it.

Next, add about a teaspoon of real vanilla, b/c it makes everything better.

Now add a cup each of granulated sugar and confectioners' sugar. If you just have granulated, you can do 2 cups of that – no biggie.

Time to make like Sir-Mix-A-Lot. (Jokes like this are entirely Rip-Diddy's fault.)

Give it a minute of mixing .

Crack 2 eggs in there and mix it some more. Why can't you do all the mixing at once, you ask? Because I said so.

Now toss 4 cups of flour and a tsp each of baking powder and salt in a separate bowl. You can sift it together if you want, but I think a whisk works just fine. Besides, I'm cheap and don't own a sifter.

It's time to turn this glorious mess into sugar cookie dough. Add the flour mix into the wet stuff a little bit at a time – I usually do ¼ of the flour at a time.

You can use your mixer at first, but you'll probably have to resort to a spoon at some point. Preferably a wooden spoon so you can smack any fingers that try to steal a pinch of your dough.

Baby got back.

After this you're supposed to refrigerate the dough for an hour. But I say rules were made to be broken. If you want you can refrigerate it overnight, or maybe, like me, you're a procrastinator. In which case …

… you can put it in the freezer for about 10 minutes, if there's room.

About 10 minutes before it's done cooling, preheat your oven to 350 and grease your pan. This makes a LOT of dough, so I recommend either 2 round pizza pans or your biggest cookie sheet. I usually use that butter/flour Baker's Joy spray stuff, but I'm out, so butter will work just fine.

Make sure it's the skankiest cookie sheet you own. Adds to the charm.

Now press the dough into the pan. You don't want to go quite to the edges because it expands when it bakes. It's fine if it's bumpy and imperfect – you won't be able to tell when it's done.

Toss it in the oven for about 9 minutes. When it comes out, it should NOT look like this:

I baked mine for entirely too long, like 13 minutes. It worked out fine – I had a crispy crust instead of a soft, chewy one, and it still tasted fine. But it should be just brown around the edges, NOT brown on top. If you're not convinced that it's done, stick a spatula under a corner and see if the bottoms are brown; if they are, it's done, no matter how raw it looks on top.

Now let this sucker cook off for awhile. I wrapped mine up in cling wrap and called it a night.

Frosting and Fruit! I'm doing this part in K-Dubs's kitchen, hence the superior utensils and surroundings.

Here's what you need:

Whatever fruit you want (mine is a flag cake, so I'm using blueberries and stemmed/quartered strawberries), 2 blocks of cream cheese, a stick of butter, vanilla extract, and powdered sugar.

First things first – the fruit. If you're making flag cake, here's how to slice the strawberries. First take out the stem by ripping off the greenery, and then inserting a paring knife vertically as close to the stem as possible. Then cut around the stem, making a cone.

Then just yank out the stem – check it out, no wasted berry.

Now cut it in quarters like so.

Then – and this is critically important – let all of your fruit drain as thoroughly as possible. Otherwise you'll get fruit juice in your cream cheese frosting and it won't look as cool.

Anyway, on to the frosting. First you're going to wrestle the cream cheese and butter into a mixing bowl. Don't even CONSIDER using reduced fat cream cheese or the taste police will lock you up forever. Add in 1 tsp vanilla.

Now whip it. Whip it good.

Add a cup of powdered sugar and mix.

Scrape the sides with a spatula and add another cup. Mix it some more.

Now, force yourself to taste some of this.

I know it looks terrible, but sacrifice. It's for the children.

It tasted perfect to me, but if you want to add more sugar, go right ahead. Whenever you're done tinkering, plop it down on your sugar cookie cake.

Splat.

Start spreadin' the news. I love offset spatulas for stuff like this. Wish I had one at home.

The great thing about this recipe is that you can cover all imperfections in the crust with the frosting. No one can see that it's bumpy and a little overbaked and that there are gaps at the edges. It's like Spanx for cake.

After it's pretty, you can add your fruit. For flag cake, use a knife or toothpick to separate your stars from your stripes.

Use your strawberries to create stripes. Don't worry about making 7 stripes, historical accuracy isn't important here.

Raspberries would probably make for neater lines, but I can't resist strawberries.

Next, add your blueberries. I started off by making outlining the border of the box we created, and then just filled it in.

I intended to use a pastry bag with a star tip to create some "stars" on top of the blueberries, but I forgot to bring it, and K-Dubs didn't have one. But still, it turned out looking decent!

Happy Fourth!