Best Thing I Ever Ate

I just ate a little sliver of cake from the Cake Boss. I have always thought of the Cake Boss as the poor man’s Duff and now I have decided that that is true.

At the time that I was eating the bit of cake I didn’t know where it had come from. A co-worker offered me a piece and when I politely declined explaining that I am on a diet, he offered instead the tiniest sliver of a fraction of the former piece over the cubical wall and I couldn’t refuse him. It is an itty bitty piece and it is Friday I thought. By the way, this type of thinking is why dieting does not work. I can rationalize almost anything. So I ate the sliver and enjoyed it, being careful not to eat any of the vanilla frosting hugging the edges of the chocolate and vanilla cake. I don’t like vanilla frosting. It gives me a head ache. After disposing of the icky cake topping I inquired into the origin of the gateaux. The Cake Boss, you say? Well I would have expected more from him and his confectionary mafia. It was light, but not quite fluffy. The chocolate was rich, but had no depth. And the frosting, well, I know I’m not the best judge since I almost always hate frosting but this time was clearly no exception.

However, for some reason I think that I might like Duff’s Charm City frosting. That's Duff with his homies on the left.

All and all I was disappointed in the Boss but writing about this now is making me think of two of the best things I ever ate.

The first Best Think I Ever Ate occurred a couple of years ago when I was in pastry school. It was at the end of a lesson half way through Level I and a few students from Level III came down to our classroom with their night’s lesson. They placed the white ramekins on chef’s table and left just as casually as they had arrived. Someone produced a bunch of tasting spoons and chef invited us all to come over and taste the soufflés. There was no resistance as I stuck my spoon into the raspberry soufflé closest to me; it had the density of the air around it. In my mouth it was the same, barely there. Only the warmth of the oven upstairs and the flavor of raspberries and sugar in my mouth proved to me that I was in fact eating. To say it melted in my mouth presupposes that I ever even felt it in my mouth. The experience was completely new and absolutely addictive. I took another bite. And another. And another.

The second Best Thing I ever Ate occurred on my twenty-fifth birthday. I was in Tokyo at the New York Grill on the fifty-second floor of the Park Hyatt there. I ordered the pan seared scallops and they arrived all lined up as if preparing to jump off the plate. Perfectly seasoned and feathered with mache; they tasted like they had been plucked from the half shell of Venus herself. Here is a picture of them, pre-jump: