FRUIT PIZZA PIE!

A dessert frankensteined from childhood memories, lazy snacks, and texts from a very helpful friend.

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Fruit pizza is bravely heretical. It’s barely pizza, except its crust is bought from the store and labeled as such. But it won’t shatter under your teeth, or taste of a wood-burning oven or natural fermentation, or call for double-zero flour. Fruit pizza swaps in cream cheese for tomato sauce, fruit for cheese. When my mother used to make it for summer holidays, its face was an American flag assembled from blueberries and strawberries. It is the crustless white bread of desserts, fluffy and soothing. It would make Sandra Lee proud. 

Summer holidays for our family meant theater cookouts. We were part of a stage magic troupe—it always feels so clunky to briefly explain this, but I guess that’s why I’m trying to write a book about it—that celebrated all holidays together, on top of performing together every Sunday. It occupied some weeknights, too: sewing costumes for my mother, projecting movies for my father. My older sibling and I had our run of the place. On holidays, we ate.

The summer parties happened at the house of a couple in the company. There were always grilled steak tips, a volleyball net, and usually some guys playing chess at a folding table. I recently unearthed some photos of us riding ponies at one of these parties; we’d rented ponies? Memory continues to fail me. I always felt strange at these company events: I never really knew who to talk to, since the scene was mostly adults who I spent a lot of time with but didn’t always know how to relate to. I was 6, I was 9, I was 12. I often hovered by the food. 

Part of the spread was always Katie’s fruit pizza: pizza dough from Stop & Shop, cream cheese, those lines of strawberries and blueberries. Sometimes I’d help her make it in the morning before Marlow and I decorated our bikes with red, white, and blue crepe paper. It was soft and sweet and doughy, the fruit bleeding into the cream cheese. You might call it a novelty dish if it weren’t so delicious. 

I haven’t eaten fruit pizza in, what, 20 years? But I always think of it when I am eating one of my favorite lazy snacks, a piece of toast with cream cheese and jam. I’ll say it: this is a more delicious treat than peanut butter toast, or even a pb&j. It is creamy, it is barely sweet, it is NOT sticky. It turns cream cheese into something bordering on elegant. You might not call it “healthy”, but it’s not dessert. It’s toast! It’s something I got really into in high school, and for which I’ve kept a flame burning.

So this summer, I asked myself: how to combine fruit pizza and cream cheese-and-jam toast? Could there be a delicious and easy baked dessert that turned the two into something sublime? Something I could proudly serve to friends? I was imagining frozen puff pastry, something that people more refined than me are always keeping in their freezers. Could I become a puff pastry woman? Would I begin to keep it stocked for jaunty little hors d’oeuvres? 

NOT puff pastry

Cale and Kyle came over for dinner earlier this summer, and I decided to make them my first guinea pigs. (Jackson, too, but what is a boyfriend if not a taste tester.) For dessert, I tried baking squares of puff pastry topped with cream cheese and jam in various layered permutations. The result was a mess: the jam and cream cheese both broke, puddling into each other in shameful ways.  Everyone at the table insisted that they tasted good, but they weren’t right. They didn’t have the thickness I was going for, or the creaminess, or even the jamminess. I worried they brought shame to the family. Plus, I decided I didn’t even like the puff pastry that much—it was floury, oddly chewy, and not at all like pie crust, which is my favorite food. If anyone wants some, I have extra in my freezer.

The idea lay dormant for months until I finally texted my friend Ben Mims, a brilliant food writer, recipe developer, and baker (he wrote a book on Southern desserts that I regularly return to, and which you should buy). He gave me TWO invaluable ideas: first, mix the jam with a bit of cornstarch slurry to keep it from running; second, mix eggs into the cream cheese. Said Ben:

In my experience, for something to have a, say, jam and cream cheese flavor profile, you have to add a few things to both to get them to act right during baking. You’re heating up something that’s meant to be stable at cold or room temperature—even butter breaks apart when heated and never returns to its normal state once cooked.

Brilliant! Of course! Science! Ben sent me some ratios and I was off on my merry way. I baked up a galette with a layer of the jam mixture (spread atop the pie crust and then chilled to firm up), a layer of the cream cheese mixture (make sure you chill it WELL to keep it from bleeding out of the galette), and a layer of sliced plums (this dessert, imo, calls for red or dark fruit). I brought it to Estelle’s house for a little dinner party and the crew went wild for it, even Clio who is “not a dessert person”. It’s not too sweet, it’s jammy, it’s got just enough ripe fruit to feel seasonal. It doesn’t taste exactly like fruit pizza or exactly like cream cheese-and-jam toast, but instead like their memory; that’s how tribute works.

EVEN IF your filling leaks a bit…..it will still be delicious….we are all human!

I suggest you make it for your little Labor Day picnic, or any day after that when you want something sweet and comforting. And please do not forget that leftover pie makes for the world’s greatest breakfast. 

Fruit Pizza Pie

Makes one 9-inch galette