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By LETITIA STEIN
Published January 28, 2005
I have forgotten Lulu's last name, but not the delicacy she introduced to our sixth-grade class. Sticky and sweet, with brittle crust and a cream cheese layer to balance a sugar rush of candied strawberries, there could be no more perfect dessert than strawberry pizza.
Lulu brought the pizzas to our middle school in north Tampa in a white, cardboard box. I still can taste each flavor, more than 14 years later.
Two years ago, I wandered through the Strawberry Festival with eyes bigger than my stomach, coughing up dollars for heaping bowls of strawberry shortcake smothered in cream. None compared to the preteen memory of my one slice of strawberry pizza.
Then came the heartbreaker. A year later, I was shopping for vegetables at Collins Produce on State Road 60. A hand-painted image showed a gooey slice of strawberry pizza. But strawberry season had ended a few weeks earlier, so no more pizzas were being made. As soon as the first strawberries blushed deep red this year, I returned to Collins Produce, but the woman with the recipe had left.
But like love, luck finds you when you least expect it. Outside Brandon's Joyner Farms I spotted a hand-scribbled menu posted to a glass door: Strawberry pizza, $8.
Inside a clear dessert case, I could see the gooey strawberries swimming in thick syrup on top of a layer of soft cream cheese and a thin crust.
"Strawberry pizza," ordered a group of women ahead of me. They laughed at the offer of a to-go box. "We're going to wear it home," one said jokingly.
The man behind me had been eating strawberry pizza by the slice all his life. His advice: Learn the differences between graham cracker and cookie crusts. He favored a crust made from crushed pecan sandies.
No one laughed to hear that my mouth had been watering since sixth grade. Instead, they cut me a slice.
P.S. After closing about four years ago, Brandon Farms is reopening its roadside winter dessert stand on State Road 60. No prices have been set, but the managers promise that strawberry pizza will be on a menu that also features shortcake and strawberry pies.
- Letitia Stein lstein@tampabay.com
[Last modified January 25, 2005, 11:40:03]
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