Kristin Chenoweth is not “a pie person.”
“I love chocolate cake. I never met a cookie I didn’t like,” explained the tiny actress, who’s only being asked about dessert because she’s on the set of ABC’s “Pushing Daisies,” perched on a chair just outside a giant pie.
That would be The Pie Hole, the restaurant where Chenoweth’s character, Olive Snook, works as a waitress and nurses a secret yen for Ned (Lee Pace), a pie maker who’s not so secretly in love with a girl named Chuck (Anna Friel).
All three will be back Wednesday at 8 p.m., when “Daisies,” having survived the writers strike, returns with its first original episode in nearly 10 months. But in the meantime, Chenoweth, who claims to be a “terrible cook,” has one pie recipe to share.
“If I have to say (a favorite) pie, then I’m going to say a pie that I make, called the Butterfinger Pie,” she told a small group of reporters in July, a couple of days before her 40th birthday.
“And it’s Cool Whip, and it’s smashed Butterfinger candy bars, and you put the Butterfinger candy bars in the Cool Whip and you mix it up, and (put it in) a graham-cracker crust and freeze it. The important thing is to freeze it. I took it out too early once … and they thought it was French onion dip!” she complained.
It’s the kind of thing that might happen to anybody, and it’s one of many gifts that the Tony Award-winning actress and singer with the Betty Boop-ish speaking voice still manages to sound like anybody, or at least like anybody from Broken Arrow, Okla.
Chenoweth, whose on-again, off-again romance with “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin was mined for material in Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” – in which the Christian character played by Sarah Paulson was loosely based on Chenoweth – has stories of her own to tell, and she’ll be doing just that in a book next year, titled “A Little Bit Wicked.”
“I had a ghost writer. I’m not going to pretend I wrote it by myself. I worked on it solid for three months,” Chenoweth said.
“It’s about my adoption, but it is about my life. I didn’t want to call it a memoir, because I don’t think that fits yet,” she said.
One thing it’s not about is the search for her birth parents.
“It’s actually kind of the opposite, about what it’s like not to do that, and what it’s like not to have that family history, but to connect with the people who raised you,” Chenoweth said.
“I get so tired of hearing people talk about Angelina’s adopted son, Maddox, and her biological daughter, Shiloh. They’re her children. And it just kind of, I think, informs who I am and my relationship to my family,” she said.
At first, she was nervous about telling her family about the book, “because I didn’t want to hurt them. Because my mom’s always like, ‘You know, if you ever want to find your real parents. …’ But they were thrilled. Because I wanted to kind of give other people inspiration.”
Not to mention permission not to look if they don’t want to.
“There’s so much pressure,” Chenoweth said. “Every time I meet somebody, and they say, ‘You’re adopted – have you found your birth parents yet?’”
She also talks about her work.
“I have a whole chapter about ‘Wicked,’ and other shows I’ve done.”
Does she dish?
“I’m not that kind of girl,” she replied demurely.
“But I also am honest, and I think that book is very truthful about experiences that I’ve had.”
Chenoweth’s hoping that Olive, once she gets back from the nunnery to which she’ll take herself in the season opener, will finally get into the detecting side of “Pushing Daisies.” (For those who haven’t seen the show, Ned possesses the power to bring back the dead – albeit briefly – and uses it to help solve murders.)
“I would probably be a detective if I were not an actress,” she said, describing herself as a “crazy nut” for shows like A&E’s “American Justice.”
