Premium Desserts

I know I am a chocolate snob. I admit it freely. When you let fine chocolate melt in your mouth, it is creamy, velvety, smooth and a whole host of other things all at once. There are different complex flavors and aromas. It's a beautiful thing. When out at a restaurant, I know that they will not use premium ingredients, and that is not a great issue for me until you are going to charge me premium prices. Don't try to sell me a $12 slice of cake that has the complexity of a Costco cake. Telling me the baker slaved away between the lunch and dinner shift to make these cakes does nothing for me aside from making me think of what a rush job it might have been.

I had a cake tonight that was described as this wonderful confection full of intense flavors and textures. The fact that it was chocolate made it even more exciting. The slice of cake I was given was presented beautifully, but that was its only high point. First, the baker needs to figure out the difference between whipped cream, ganache and mousse because whatever the heck the two layers of white filling were on top of the cake was none of these, unless it was a mixture of the three. I am assuming there was a dark chocolate layer of cake, and on top of that was a milk chocolate layer of cake, both of which had no flavor. Here's a hint: Dutch Processed Cocoa has much more flavor than the Hershey's cocoa that was being used. Yeah, I can pick out the cocoa they used. There was alcohol somewhere in the layers, but as always, it was used as a way to moisten a dry cake, so you really get that alcohol flavor. Then there was the white stuff that was taller than the two layers of chocolate cake on top of each other. The chocolate shavings were off a Hershey's bar or something because there was only a sugary flavor to them, and the tissue paper thin shavings did not melt between my fingers. That's not normal. Somehow, they screwed up cream cheese frosting because the stuff that had been piped on top of the cake and the sides was grainy. Here's the kicker: The chocolate syrup drizzled over the cake was Hershey's Syrup from the bottle! While this does fool many people, it does not fool me.

To sum this tirade up, if you want sub-par confections, use sub-par products. If you want premium confections, use premium products. It's as simple as that.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some chocolate chips to go suck on. At least they are Ghiladelli.