Ring the bell, it's time for Last Call, where JK Grence, bartender at Shady's, serves up booze advice and recipes. Got a burning question for your bartender? Leave it in the comments and it might be answered in a future column.

The folks involved with Chow Bella are getting more than a little excited about our upcoming Pie Social. How excited? Even the booze column is giving pie tips.

See Also:

- Want to Be An Official Pie Social Judge? Here's How.

Five years ago, the staff of Cook's Illustrated magazine started a baking revolution when they developed a new pie crust recipe. The number one enemy of pie crust bakers is gluten. If you overwork the dough, you develop too much gluten and end up with a tough crust. Someone at Cook's Illustrated realized that if you replace some of the water with vodka, less gluten develops, making it a piece of cake easy as pie to create the tenderest, flakiest crust you've ever had.

There is one problem with this technique. The problem is that the alcohol burns off in the oven. I'd rather enjoy a drink with my pie, and I'm sure you would too.

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Unknown

The best thing about being the judge for the 2012 Chow Bella Halloween Candy Showdown is, well, being the judge for the 2012 Chow Bella Halloween Candy Showdown. Bring on the sugar rush, Baby.

With the challenge being to whip up a dessert incorporating their favorite Halloween candy, my fellow scribes cooked, crafted, and, overall, helped the bottom lines of Valley candy sellers with their all treat-no trick creations.

My challenge: to choose the winner -- or in this case, winners.

And for this spooky-themed showdown, I've decided to hand out the awards based on some of my favorite monsters.

The best part? You can try the ones that make your sweet tooth tingle simply by clicking on the links and scoring the recipes.

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Claire Lawton

Trick... or treat? For the latest Chow Bella showdown, our writers whipped up a dessert reminiscent of, or incorporating, their favorite Halloween candy. Check back all week for recipes; tomorrow our critic Laura Hahnefeld will pick her favorite.

Today: Claire Lawton's Chocolate Chip Heath Bars

See also:
- Make Your Own Candy Corn
- Make Your Own Candy Sushi

I've always been a huge fan of anything chocolate, but I've successfully kept my thing for toffee a secret (especially from my dentist). You can't like all the sweets, right? In any case, when I discovered the killer pairing of chocolate and toffee in a Heath Bar, I couldn't be stopped. I was so happy to put 10 of them onto the checkout conveyor belt for this recipe, it was slightly embarrassing.

Here's the recipe for a dessert using my all-time-favorite Halloween (and year-round) candy.

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Claire Lawton

Katie's Twix pie.

Trick... or treat? For the latest Chow Bella showdown, our writers whipped up a dessert reminiscent of, or incorporating, their favorite Halloween candy. Check back all week for recipes; on Friday our critic Laura Hahnefeld will pick her favorite.

Today: Katie Johnson's Twix Cheesecake Pie

I've never been much of a whiz in the kitchen (unless you count burnt as a spice and partially frozen as a lowbrow form of molecular gastronomy). So when the challenge of making a Halloween-inspired dish using our favorite commercial candies presented itself, I took the easy way out: Twix Cheesecake Pie.

See also:
- Make Your Own Candy Corn
- Make Your Own Candy Sushi

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Claire Lawton

Ando's candy sushi.

Trick... or treat? For the latest Chow Bella showdown, our writers whipped up a dessert reminiscent of, or incorporating, their favorite Halloween candy. Check back all week for recipes; on Friday our critic Laura Hahnefeld will pick her favorite.

Today: Ando Muneno's candy sushi

For this competition I wanted to do something a little different so I used my lateral thinking to steal be inspired by the Epic Meal Time guys. After some intense research (read: I watched an hour of youtube videos) I decided that candy sushi would meet the dual qualifications of looking cool and tasting good.

See also:
- Make Your Own Candy Corn
- Make Your Own Black Vodka

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Claire Lawton

Candy corn, DIY-style.

Trick... or treat? For the latest Chow Bella showdown, our writers whipped up a dessert reminiscent of, or incorporating, their favorite Halloween candy. Check back all week for recipes; on Friday our critic Laura Hahnefeld will pick her favorite.

First up: Amy Silverman's DIY Candy Corn

There are two kinds of people in the world:

The people who hate candy corn. And the people who can't live without it.

If you are fall into the latter -- and wait! perhaps even if you are in the former group -- this recipe is for you. It's relatively easy, it's preservative-free (can you imagine the shelf life of candy corn and what makes it that way?!) and it's delicious. It's also an excellent conversation piece at a party.

See also:
- Make Your Own Candy Corn-Infused Vodka
- Make Your Own Candy Conversation Hearts

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Laurie Notaro

See also: Laurie Notaro's Five Reasons Why Haboobs Are Awesome

Several weeks ago, I was forced by the hand of hormones to make a pan of brownies. It happens. One moment you're browsing an Anthropologie catalog thinking, "They'd do so much more business if they sold sizes boobs actually fit into," and the next moment, you have cocoa powder on your brow as you're shoving what looks like a pan of mud into the oven and decide it's in your best interest to spend the following 20 minutes standing next to it, waiting.

I used a recipe I found online, and while the batter tasted promising, I threw half a pan of the brownies away, uneaten, unpicked at, and at the time, I had a 19-year old nephew staying with us. Seriously. Unpleased, was I.

So unpleased that I decided to tackle the recipe again, with some well-noted adjustments regarding the short-comings of the brownie recipe known as "Chewie Brownie 1." So I did. I admit, parts of it are obscene. I know that. But when you realize that you might have to start shopping at Chico's, you've got to do something to make the world right again.

Wave that brownie wand, my friends.

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Andre Pielage

You went to Schnepf Farms this weekend? Don't worry, we've got you (and your peaches) covered.

Okay, so you took Chow Bella's advice and went out to a local farm to pick some peaches. Now you've got a crap-ton of them, they're getting softer by the minute and you'd like to use 'em before you lose 'em.

Enter chef-owner Justin Beckett of Beckett's Table, who has graciously provided us with two recipes to make use of early summer's sweet peach crop. The first is for a dough-less (and therefore failsafe) peach and strawberry cobbler. The second -- a green salad perked up with grilled peaches.

Not up to cooking but hungry for juicy peaches? Visit Beckett's Table and get your fill of them. Once Restaurant Week is over (May 27), Beckett will be bringing in five crates of peaches for the next five weeks. It's going to be a veritable peachapalooza in there.

But if you're psyched to make something at home and pronto, read on:

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Smart Kitchen

With the science fiction action-drama film The Hunger Games opening in theaters this Friday, March 23, fans of the book by Suzanne Collins are keyed-up like Katniss in hopes that director Gary Ross doesn't screw the whole thing up. (Effie's clothes had better be wild enough, dammit.)

And what better way to calm a case of the children-killing-children nerves than with a steaming hot bowl of mushroom soup -- Hunger Games style.

At least that's what Smart Kitchen, the online culinary school based in Scottsdale, thinks. As fans of the novel, they were captivated by its evocative descriptions of food -- specifically, the Training Center Meal -- and got Smart Kitchen chef Eric O'Neill to create his own interpretation of it by using most of the ingredients in a soup.

Read on to for details on O'Neill's Hunger Games soup-tastic creation and to get the recipe.

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What better use for an extra case of Girl Scout cookies than a Chow Bella Showdown? In years past we've challenged our contributors to make something delicious out of Thin Mints and Trefoils. This time: Savannah Smiles. Stay tuned for more recipes and a decision from our "judge," web editor Eric Tsetsi.

Okay, I'll be the first one to admit that there isn't anything "XXX" or extreme about these cinnamon rolls. Unless you consider spending almost six hours on one batch of cinnamon rolls obscene or extreme.

That's right, I spent six freakin' hours making cinnamon rolls. SIX HOURS!

Most of that time was spent waiting for things to rise, but six hours of waiting around sucks. And since I spent so much time waiting to get a "rise" out of these suckers, I figured I should throw the "XXX" in (and let's not forget about a certain porn star that used Savannah as her, ahem, "stage" name).

Moving on. When I first acquired my box of super sweet lemon cookies, I immediately thought about making tarts. Lemon tarts with a cookie crust would be the easiest idea. Or maybe lemon bars? Or, maybe, I could just make things really difficult on myself and make cinnamon rolls from scratch?

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