The Best Thing I've Eaten In Months

Today I was a good person. I was helpful and bonded with another human being by helping her. The result was she insisted I take a homemade cake pop.

I meant to take a second photo, showing a cross-section of this masterpiece, but–in all honestly–it was so delicious that I consumed the entire thing before I had any thought unrelated to devouring this morsel more quickly.

That said, here's a breakdown:

Under the hand-wrapping is a chocolate-covered sphere of the darkest, most moist chocolate cake I have ever had the pleasure of savoring. This is not hyperbolic by any means. It was literally the greatest piece of cake I have ever had. This has its moisture sealed in by a near-perfectly round chocolate shell, topped in its last moments of molten life my a cascade of mini-M&Ms. As promised, it was delicious cold, with a nice hard shell yet still gooey cake inside.

I don't normally do this, but there's no joke here. This woman, Andrea Sommers, was lovely and her confection was utterly astounding. She bakes professionally, on a very small scale. Her business card is simply her name and phone number, and the phrase, "Homemade Macaroons; Wrapped and shipped for all occasions."

All orders are placed by word-of-mouth, and she has no website for me to plug. For those interested in the local area, I will provide you with her contact number if you would like to place an order. (I do not know how far she would ship. It probably depends on the specific baked good.) For my local friends, I included it in the link from my personal facebook.

I hope someone calls her and orders some amazing desserts, because this was, in absolute honesty, the best thing I have ever eaten in months.

Of Opportunities Taken

For once I can earnestly say I have taken the road I would otherwise have left untrodden and infested with alligators or whatever typically befalls unbeaten baths.

Last weekend I was in Long Island. While there, I got to experience some kind of strange, Spanish-Asian grocery market by the unsavory name of "Giunta's Meat Farms." There is no farm. There is a great quantity of meat, though I must admit not much more than one might find in, say, Shoprite or A&P.

However, this place did have ridiculous foods I'd never heard of. I managed to snatch up some snow peas, which are almost the edamame I can never find back home, as well as a variety pack of these:

These are apparently Cocon brand "puddings," though I doubt they contain any dairy and are more in line with the Old World notion of what constitutes a pudding. You can see the variety pack includes Mango, Strawberry, Passion Fruit and Lychee nut flavors, as well as "Honey Melon" (honeydew) and I think pineapple.

Have you ever had flan? That's about what the consistency is. However this brand seems to be known for a "chunks of fruit at the bottom" product, but I have to be completely honest with you: I don't think there's any fruit anywhere in there.

Oh sure, there are things. Things that taste like fruits, but they are not pieces of fruit. I am not in any way sure they are even made from fruits. They might be simply fruitlike in tasture. Certainly not texture, but they are almost perfect cubes of a solid, milky-clear gelatin, perhaps similar to the "pudding" yolk that nurtures it. These vile, unnatural embryos of alpaca hooves and citric acid and food dyes number 2, 7 and 14 have the consistency of aged, tough Jell-O. The closest fruit analogue I can muster is a low-nutrition, high-sugar syrup fruit cup chunk of pineapple with some of the skin still attached. Except all the chunks are like that. Perfect uniform balls of congealed acid flavor and slipperiness. I'm surprised children don't choke to death on them regularly. (Or perhaps they do and that's why reputable American grocers do not cary Cocon.)

The internet says these things are "nata de coco," a gelatinized coconut milk product, sweetened and thrown into desserts. I can almost buy it.

But then again, halfway through the package I discovered they give you six individual tiny-tiny plastic spoons to eat your pudding with, so all is forgiven.


… Tiny spoons!

On Time

I'm sitting here eating a box of Girl Scout Samoa cookies and it occurs to me that the little girl on the packaging is only moderately adorable.

She's got a mouth full of baby teeth and eyes that have yet to be completely crushed under the weight of the world's expectations. I mean she's being crushed under the weight of the world's expectations, but it's an ongoing process. She's only recently accepted that "boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls." She doesn't really understand why, but she knows it by rote. Still, she feels something like elation she can't quite understand when they ask her to wear a burned-out helmet and pretend she's a firefighter.

Then it occurs to me that this picture is probably really old. Based on the girl's little turtleneck and the look of everyone giggling and crowding around a gushing fire hose on the package's reverse, I'm guessing it's at least five years old, perhaps as much as ten.

Which is really weird, because it means that cute little girl could be a sexy, entirely legal coed by now. (Though, as a girl scout and judging by bone structure she's more likely reasonably attractive with an okay face.) This is a disturbing possibility. She's probably pretty cute, with a wildly narrow-minded Type A personality, resulting from her yuppie parents pushing her into overly structured, backwards social interactions at an early age.

Anyway, Samoas are delicious and this will not ruin a good cookie for me. It's the same as I've been saying for years about Dave Thomas' adopted daughter Wendy: somewhere out there there's a seventy-five year old man who, every time his children drive him past the fast food franchise, says, "Wendy? Yeah, I hit that."