BURBANK, Calif. — Kristin Chenoweth is not “a pie person.”
“I love chocolate cake. I never met a cookie I didn’t like,” said the famously tiny actress, who’s only being asked about dessert because she’s on the Warner Bros. 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 Oct. 1 on ABC, when “Daisies,” having survived the writers strike, returns with its first original episode in nearly 10 months.
“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 a few days after being nominated for a supporting actress Emmy for “Pushing Daisies.” “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 served it here, and they thought it was French onion dip! They put their chips in there,” she said.
It’s the kind of thing that might happen to anybody, and it’s one of Chenoweth’s 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’s on-again, off-again romance with “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin was mined for material in Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” The Christian character played by Sarah Paulson was not-so- loosely based on Chenoweth.
She has stories of her own to tell, and she’ll be doing just that next year in a book titled “A Little Bit Wicked.” “I had a ghost writer, I’m not going to pretend I wrote it by myself,” 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, laughing.
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.
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.”
