Employee wins pie contest

Thanks to a tasty combination of peanut butter, banana and chocolate, you can call Marvin Highrock “Marvelous Marvin” now.

Highrock, 39, has worked at Cyrus O’Leary’s Pies for the past three years. He’s the leader of the crew that works the fruit pie machine.

But he’s now seeing his name on pie labels after winning a company-sponsored contest to invent a new pie flavor.

“We are always looking for a new idea or an improvement,” says Dennis Dipo, director of operations for the Spokane-based pie company. “So we decided to run a contest with the employees.”

Highrock was inspired by an Elvis wrap treat he had at Pigout in the Park – a tortilla slathered with peanut butter, wrapped around a banana and some chocolate, he says. He thought the flavor combination would be perfect in a pie.

He passed along the suggestion to the company’s research and development director and she made a prototype.

“I loved it,” Highrock said

Not only did he love it. Judges at April’s American Pie Council National Pie Championship in Florida awarded his concoction first place in the “super-gourmet peanut butter category.”

Cyrus O’Leary’s swept the gourmet competition at the pie contest, winning seven first-place awards in addition to the one for the peanut butter-banana pie. Blue ribbons went to the company’s coconut cream, chocolate cream, sour cream lemon, no sugar-added cherry, fruit-juice sweetened marionberry, fruit-juice sweetened apple and strawberry rhubarb pies.

Highrock’s Marvelous Marvin Pie is loaded with creamy peanut-butter filling on top of chocolate ganache and sliced fresh bananas. The whole thing is piled into a graham-cracker crust and smothered with whipped cream, chocolate sauce and a few extra peanuts for good measure.

It retails for $7.99 wherever Cyrus O’Leary’s pies are sold.