Candy Bar Pie

During many a week, candy bars make up 50 percent (or more) of my diet. As a teen, I already showed a predilection for staying hip to the culinary scene at the grocery store, trolling the aisles to check out interesting frozen items, new cereals, perhaps a vamped-up cookie section, and, of course, the impulse-buy area—one of my favorites—with its multitude of candy bars trying to break into the market. Which is why I was hooked on Take 5 candy bars long before I ever thought about making a pie inspired by them. I was blown away by my first bite of one, in the passenger seat of the family van in the Giant parking lot of NoVa. My sister had one cluster, and the other was all mine. It is the epitome of perfectly layered chocolate, peanuts, caramel, peanut butter, and pretzels. Hershey’s describes it as “a unique taste experience combining five favorite ingredients in one candy bar. The result is a delicious salty sweet snack unlike anything else.” Amazing. For my birthday a couple of years ago, Dave bought me two cases, that’s 480 clusters, of Take 5 candy bars and dared me to eat them all in a month. With a little help from my friends, I did it in twenty-eight days. On my birthday, that first day, I ate seven—and then puked the next morning (bad idea). Marian Mar made a big push to get this pie on the opening menu of Milk Bar, because, as she once put it, we are candy bars, and candy bars are us. So we need a candy bar pie on the menu. It’s a little bit of a bitch to make, which was my main argument for wanting to leave it off the menu. But working in this industry is a labor of love, after all, and Marian was right all along. This pie is one of our top sellers even today. We lovingly refer to it at Milk Bar as the T-5 pie.