My Specialty!

I relish every opportunity to collaborate with the "Indie Queen" herself, Norah Sharpe. When I was just getting started as a constructor, Norah was there to offer a guiding hand and link me up with some invaluable resources. At a point when I only had a single byline under my belt, for a small indie venue, she took a chance and hosted one of my puzzles on her own blog. Without her encouragement I'm not sure I ever would have taken the leap to make my own blog, and now here we are! So, to that end, thank you Norah for all of your support, and thank you for entertaining this idea to collab on another silly puzzle with me! I hope you all enjoy this one.

 

Norah says, "It's always a pleasure to work with Matt. He's a frequent contributor to Lemonade Disco where I am a puzzle editor - please check out our submission guidelines for the new midi series gin + grapefruit! This puzzle came about from tossing around fun theme ideas and landing on this delicious set. I hope you find something tasty in it!"

Note: due to formatting issues, the .puz and PDF downloads have an alternative clue for 16A.

puz |  PDF |

Matt's Musings

Full disclosure - we had initially aimed this puzzle at a mainstream outlet and got "the no" because the theme was too close to something they had printed recently. So instead of shelving the puzzle for all eternity, we thought, "Ok, well, let's see if we can punch this up and make it worthy of a blog puzzle!" I think the end result here is more fun as a result, and I hope you agree! Thanks for solving!