And Then You Wake Up the Day After Easter With Peep Sugar in Your Belly Button

My friend J had an impromptu make-your-own pizza party on Sunday. Night of the risen crust and deflated Peep. And what a fun party! Lots of wine, creative and delicious pizzas, dark chocolate bunnies, exotic liqueurs. And Peeps galore!

J got the dough from Pizzeria Paradiso. He'd made a big vat of luscious, bright red, homemade tomato sauce. There were myriad toppings to choose from, ranging from the expected to the exotic: mozzarella, basil, spinach, roasted peppers, chevre, roasted garlic, broccolini, chicken sausage, pulled pork, prosciutto, chives, mint chutney, peaches, asparagus...

He had the party to christen his new kitchen. He'd redone it with lovely blue glass tile on the back splash, and blue counters. And clean white cabinets. All very simple and sophisticated.

There was a beautiful blue drink, which they called the Bridget Jones, because it looked exactly like that pale blue soup she made in the movie. It was some noxious vodka-curacao-secret ingredient (which I secretly suspect was ground up Devil's toenails) made for the occasion.

It was blue. It was beautiful. It matched the kitchen. And it tasted so terrible that I'm putting this remarkably heinous picture of myself up so you have some idea of the magnitude of the horribleness. Seriously. Just. Like. Ass.

But back to the positive. The pizza! As sometimes happens when you get a lot of lawyers in a room together, things got a little competitive. There were great combinations; there were suspect combinations.

Sometimes really simple pizza is fantastic, right? But then why make a pizza just with mozzarella and basil when you can make one with BBQ pork and mint chuntey? Or shrimp paste and broccolini? Especially if you can make something that sounds really repulsive, but people actually like it. You win!

Our friend L, she won. She created a pizza with peaches and prosciutto. It sounds kind of vile, but it was excellent. That salty fat and sweet fruit combo worked perfectly.

And here's the saddest but best part. The Peep. Who looks so peaceful in a field of peaches. The lone little sacrificial Peep, sitting on the Sistine pizza, oblivious to the finger of God above him.

Before I go on about Peep antics, I have to rhapsodize a little about this pizza. To be fair, I'd had a number of glasses of wine before this, the pizza de resistance (heh). So maybe there were better, earlier pizzas, and I just don't remember them. But still. It was delicious.

Now, getting a Peep to burn is a little harder than one expects. You can't just light his ear on fire, it turns out. Sometimes you have to douse him in Cointreau first. But immolation in a Cointreau bath can't be the worst way to go, can it? There are worse ways to be laid to rest in Peep. Did I really just say that? I did.

And after the burning and the melting? L took a big, happy, victorious bite. And then shared with the rest of us.

The night continued on in the slightly ridiculous manner that one might expect, considering that the entire crowd was consuming wine, gruesome Bridget Jones drink, Cointreau-doused pizza, some truly sinful chocolate cake, like sex on a plate, really, and then gorgeous dark Belgian bunny chocolate.

Post-dinner there were also some Peep in the microwave antics. I'll spare you the play-by-play, but here are the results.

This was all capped off with Cynar and Aperol, liqueurs made predominantly from artichoke and orange-rhubarb, respectively. As if we weren't all drunk enough on carbs and sugar.

During the whole Peep pizza incident, honestly, I was thinking, "Poor Peep. You look so sad melting all alone on that pizza. Poor little yellow bunny Peep."

But I think it's the bunny thing. Because at some point it can seem like a good idea to pull the head off a little pink chicken Peep. Just to see how it looks in a belly button. And I can now say with authority that a Peep looks somehow both alarming and comfortable nestled in the navel of a hirsute man.

And so you can fully appreciate, I'm posting yet another dramatically unflattering shot. Full pizza belly. With Peep. And wings!