Fry me a River

When it comes to desserts, I am a great believer in two guiding principles:

1) If it can be dunked in chocolate, then dunk it.
2) If it can be deep-fried, then deep-fry it.  

I won't call these laws because they will vary depending on the dessert, the occasion, and a person's prevailing mood. As one must be discerning with an eye open to the prevailing artistic designs inherent within each culinary specimen (recognizing subtle strategic variations in plating arrangements) when formulating a plan for the godbite, so too I would recommend restraint and good judgement be practiced with regard to these two principles.

Disclaimer: blind devotion to one scheme with strident disregard to the great flux of variables will most certainly lead to disaster. 


That said, I don't believe I need to justify these suggestions.  What with the popularity of chocolate fondue and county fairs where they deep-fry just about anything that's edible (and even things that aren't. paula didn't heed my disclaimer. go figure. somehow i think people would eat tires if they were deep-fried), they seem rather obvious.  Nonetheless, these principles serve as the basis for one of my favorite times of the year.

Despite my brothers and I being between the ages of 22 and 19, every year we still ask my parents for Easter baskets.  (i hate to think what'll happen when we're actually supposed to act grown up, but that isn't now, we refuse to let it happen).  If we could, I'm sure we would ask them to hide the baskets around Penn's campus so that we could run around in our PJ's (do people even wear those anymore? it sounds so infantile - not that my description of myself right now is helping to combat that imagery) crazed and frothing at the mouth thinking of the sugar high we'll soon be on that is sure to carry us until midnight (as a conservative estimate).

But what is so exciting is what's in the Easter basket.  Forget the traditional candy, peeps (yuck. i don't want to get started on those. they are so gross), and fake grass.  These have...

...drum roll, please....

You read that label correctly.  And on the right is a chocolate covered Twinkie.

Two all-time favorites made even better.  If you can dunk it in chocolate, then dunk it.

These are SO good.  I look forward to them for so long every year, and they never last long enough. 

See, I always cut the Twinkie in half (most definitely not out of concern for calories. those thingies couldn't be farther from my mind) with the idea that I can make it last longer if I eat half one day and half the other.  Never ends up working out that way.

I usually attack these by biting off the bottom layer of chocolate and eating toward the ends.  That's because the chocolate shell is both thicker at the top (and there are sprinkles up there!!!!) rather than the bottom and there is greater chocolate coverage towards the rear.  Have to make sure that there is still cream in the last bite though.

For the Oreos....bite, chew, suck, let it melt in your mouth.  It's pretty impossible to mess eating them up.

And speaking of Oreos, that brings up principle #2.  Fried Oreos.

This past weekend was Spring Fling at Penn.  An event most significant to me because it means two things.  Free food and fried Oreos.  The Oreos aren't free though. Actually, they pretty much bankrupt your wallet.  It's okay because the stomach is a pretty good at negotiating, and it'll persuade the wallet that it's worth the investment. Bu, as good as they are, this year wasn't about fried Oreos.

Ever since a county fair several years ago when they were selling fried candy bars - only for me to decide not get them on, regret my decision, and return the following year to find out that they weren't being sold anymore - I've have had this great burden on my stomach (err...heart) to eat a fried candy bar (not the most epic of missions, but that's the gritty reality of truth).

This year turned out to be my lucky year.

Once in the proximity of the tent selling fried Oreos, a strange feeling passed over me.  I want a fried candy bar.  Maybe they are selling them this year.  I looked.  And there they were.  Right on the sign, "Fried Candy Bars ---- $5."  The whole thing might've been freaky if I wasn't so happy.

Photo courtesy of Kerry McLaughlin - so that I didn't smear grease & powdered sugar all over the camera.

Let me tell you, they were epic.  Assorted mini candy bars (Twix, MilkyWay, and 3 Musketeers) battered and deep-fried.  Imagine your favorite chocolate chip pancakes and multiply the taste by 10.  These were good.  And lest you ask, no, these aren't for sharing.  You can eat all six of them on your own.  I promise.

The only downside to all of this was that it made me rethink my two guiding principles of dessert - was I somehow not getting the full potential out of my desserts. 

What if --

What if I had a chocolate covered Twinkie or Oreo and deep-fried it?

Just Stupid Good

So here I am ensconced on some pretty awesome pictures for a blog, but with a vibe antithetical to the typical loquacious propensities customarily spurred on by such images.  Lest I am tempted to posit the remote happenstance that I might still manage to pull something off by interspersing a smattering of high-brow verbiage...

...I am reminded that it would require a lot of time spent searching the thesaurus.

So I'll best be moving on.  <-- that's more like the typical grammar level I'm feeling right now.  The longest word is 6 letters and formed by smashing a suffix onto a four-letter word like I was the Large Hadron Collider (adding prefixes and suffixes is so much more exciting when it's phrased that way).

Onwards to things more worthy of your attention, like cookie dough.

Thrown in ice cream, or baked, or baked and then thrown in ice cream, or just eaten raw, it's pretty good - to make a dramatic understatement.  I've never realized it before, but the way I've always thought about cookie dough has always been so one-dimensional.  I would take it and eat it inside the box never thinking of the limitless possibilities available to it.  Cookie dough could only do one thing at a time and that was it.

Well, I lie.  There's always been cookie dough ice cream on cookies to make an ice cream cookie sandwich.  But even that is hardly revolutionary thinking.  It doesn't even require cookie dough ice cream.  Any will do.

But now, say you were to replace that ice cream with raw cookie dough. 

Yeah.  Has it registered yet?  Raw cookie dough between two baked cookies.  There isn't even a metaphor I can think of for it.  It's just stupid good. 

(the recipe for those who'd like)

For cookiage this serious, I had the uncontrollable urge to build a pyramid (it's best never to the strangeness of those urges or you'll begin to wonder about yourself).  Except it was more like a triangle.  But a pyramid would have been cool.  That's what I want to be buried in - a cookie pyramid,....not a triangle.  Actually, I'm rather like the Bermuda triangle of cookies.  They disappear if they get too close to me.  So I'm a cookie-eating triangle wanting to be buried in a cookie pyramid.  That's quality stuff right there.

 And a close-up for good measure.  Close-ups are always needed.  I wish I was as photogenic as it is.

I don't doubt that these things could actually be used as bricks for building a pyramid.  They are quite heavy.  You've got like four cookies worth of material there.  But because it's a sandwich, it only counts as one dessert.

That's why those food judges on the Food Network say presentation is everything.  It can make or break the dessert.
1 cookie sandwich = 1 dessert
2 cookies + filling on the side = 3 desserts (if not more)

 Such a solid dessert.  Chocolate cookies with chocolate chip cookie dough filling.  Fills the mouth like an explosion.  A good explosion.  An explosion where if your mouth could talk it'd say, "I just can't take this it's so good!" 

....oh...yeah....your mouth can talk.

Nom-noms...

...num-nums...

...and last but not least, yum-yums.