deep dish pizza

we have a great recipe that we love to make homemade pizza with, and it's such an easy recipe too. normally we make a whole wheat dough and roll it out on a large pizza stone - delicious. well, we watched a tv show a couple of weeks ago about pizza: chicago vs. ny and i've had a craving ever since to try to make deep dish pizza. it went rather well for the first attempt but we have some ideas as to how to make it better. First here's the recipe for the whole wheat pizza dough that we usually make:
2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbsp. active dry yeast
3/4 tsp. salt
1 cup warm water
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. honey
pour flour into a large mixing bowl, add yeast and salt. mix well. add water, oil and honey; mix well. cover with a moist cloth and place in a warm spot for 10 minutes to rise. punch down and roll out onto a 14 inch pizza stone (make sure to oil and flour the stone well). spread sauce and other ingredients on pizza crust. bake at 425 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes or until crust is golden brown and cheese is melted.
the recipe is great with white flour too. so with the deep dish, we made the dough with white flour and pressed it into a cake pan. we then started with cheese, onion, basil, tomato a layer of italian sausage and finally the sauce with a sprinkling of salt, pepper and parmesan. it took considerably longer to cook - i think about 45 minutes total actually. it turned out super yummy, but when we try this again we're going to try a thinner crust (or larger cake pan - just a bit too much crust on this one) and we're going to pre-cook the sausage (that's why it took so long to cook - didn't want raw sausage on our pizza). it was a great first try, and soooo filling.