"Dude, trust me. Those are ravioli and ravioli won Foodie Fights last week. You're dead before you even begin."

"Last week? The week you entered? And how did you do my good man? How well did your mac and cheese fare, eh?"

"I hate you."

For the record, these have a similar form to ravioli, and yes, I did use a ravioli press to make them, but they aren't. Why not? Well, first off ravioli usually have cheese or meat in them. These have neither. Secondly ravioli are a savory dish, these have freaking frosting on them. CREAM CHEESE FROSTING! Thirdly, well, because I damn well said so. There. Are we done here? I've been thinking of making some sort of dessert pasta dish for a few days now. While I never imagined them having any sort of pomegranate in them it fits well, especially since poms are a fall/winter fruit I figured these fit right in. I had kind of settled on a small ravioli form a while back. I figured those would bake up nicely and make for tidy little mouthfuls of whatever you stuffed them with.

So what was I aiming for? A simple dessert of a pastry with fruit filling, baked, iced and served warm. Don't forget the cinnamon-sugar baked into the crust, natch! And while I did end up with that, I most emphatically do not recommend using semolina flour in trying to make a tradition butter-based pie/pastry crust. The semolina doesn't bind well enough for that to be possible. Hell, the bag of flour I got (for the record its the same brand the FF'ers used in the photo on their post last week!) actually states "Some users prefer a mix of 50% semolina and 50% all purpose flour". Hmmmm.

As far as the pomegranates go... well those were tougher to find. As you all know pomegranate is a biblical euphemism for ta-tas. And ta-tas is a teenage euphemism for fun-bags which is of course a euphemism for boobs. Mmmmmmm pomegranates. Enough said.

So what did I do? Well, mix up the filling (below) first and let it more or less cool. You can tell from the pix that I made way more of this stuff than I should have. 'Sokay, it tasted wonderful as a jam spread over toast later. After a couple of hours wrestling with the semolina flour ('semolina' is based on the ancient Latin word semilia which means flour, so we have flour flour. Really.) I finally managed to get a dough that was what I needed for the pastry dough. It ended up being closer to a pasta dough than pastry, but since they share so many letters of the alphabet in common I called it good and moved along.

Assembly with my pasta press just took a few minutes then pop into the oven and done. These were flaky, moist and with a balance of dates and pomegranates they were definitely rocking this wonderfully harvest/fall flavor, all of it offset by the cream cheese frosting. Give me a warm fire, blanket and a cup of hot chocolate (heavily spiked with spiced rum, natch!) and we're golden. Enjoy folks, and best of luck to my competition in Foodie Fights 12. PS: Thanks to my lovely wife Robin for coming up with the idea for the name.