SEPTEMBER 2023
PEYTON JANE GIBSON
I am obsessed with dessert. But to qualify as a heavenly treat according to my standards, the requirements are much stricter than Merriam-Webster's bland definition of "a sweet course or dish usually served at the end of a meal" or Wikipedia's lengthy cataloging of this type of food. In my world, and what I believe should be everyone else’s, a real dessert is as follows:
Let's be honest, everything else is either a snack, candy, or breakfast.
The origins of my sweet tooth likely come from my dad. When I was a kid, my mom complained during his “chubbier” phases that he would never lose weight if he kept eating Twizzlers at work. Having believed that candy was something you stopped eating regularly after you were too old to Trick-or-Treat and noting a lack of licorice around the house, I found it impossible that a grown man was consuming an excessive amount of Twizzlers at the office.
Years later, when I was seventeen, my dad was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, and I got to intern at the same 18th-century palatial fortress compound, scanning legal documents, delivering packages to attachés, and teaching the Italian and American employees alike how to recycle. It was the first time I could snoop on the one place that had never been accessible to me: my dad’s office. And there they were, sneakily tucked into the back of the third drawer on the right side of his desk: Twizzlers.
His dependence on the sugary red sticks was so strong that he’d managed to get his hands on a regular supply in Italy– maybe a bit easier in today’s world, but back in 2013, a heroic feat. When I go home to my parent’s place in Colorado these days, I can still find them in a cabinet or pantry, albeit a little less hidden.
Although my mom’s guilty pleasure and mid-day sneak is usually a local IPA or canned mixed drink, perhaps the ‘complex’ piece of my dessert definition originates with her. My sister and I have a running joke about her bizarre alcohol preferences; she often goes for brews like pecan pie stouts. One time, she got so carried away with a peanut butter chocolate whiskey at Christmas that she mistakenly tried to get out of the car on the highway on the way home. Other than alcohol, I rarely witness my mom consume anything with sugar.
Licorice and Pumpkin Pie Stouts are obviously not desserts, but the journey to my current definition of the word is long and multi-faceted. The first step to defining my obsession began with 100 Grands. At eight years old, I initially liked them solely for their name, thinking that the more I could collect at Halloween, the faster I would become a billionaire. But with time, I realized that the texture of the crisped rice hardened into the chocolate, complemented with a rough caramel filling, was far more intricate and superior than that of the lowly juvenile Snickers.
The following mix of sugary textures and chocolatey delight caught my naive attention: seasonal white fudge Oreos. When I was younger, my parents convinced me that these heavenly Nabisco snacks were too expensive to purchase often and that buying them would take away from our holiday gift budget. However, in the Netherlands, where I live now, the Dutch version of the Christmas Oreo is available year-round as “Enrobed Whites”. Whenever I see them at the grocery store, my inner child wants to gobble up an entire box, but I must restrain myself. But even an Oreo dipped in white fudge is still an Oreo. At best, it’s a sweet snack– a cookie– not a dessert. And so, our journey continues.
Around ten years old, when my family was living in Richmond Hill, Georgia, I began formally developing my current definition of desserts, starting with, and principally including, ice cream. Every night after a dinner of Kraft Mac and Cheese, Spongebob-shaped if my sister and I were well-behaved that day, our mom (who is not much of a chef) would serve up a bowl of Breyers Cookies & Cream Ice Cream. If we had been well-behaved and brought home good grades, we would get to upgrade our bowls with (Fat-Free) Reddi Wip and some Mario Maraschino Cherries.
I mention the food brands by name because, unlike home addresses, they were consistent in our military family’s life. My parents didn’t have Ben and Jerry’s money, so every week, our mom would drive thirty minutes to the Army Commissary (instead of the fifteen to our rural Publix) for family grocery shopping. The Commissary is the military’s ‘chain’ grocery store where they sell food at cost to service members, veterans, and their dependents because of negotiations with specific manufacturers. So no matter how far out in the middle of nowhere we lived (here’s looking at you, Sierra Vista, AZ), we could always get our Breyers and Kraft– at a great price! And at the rate that I was consuming ice cream, my parents needed the discount.
For months, the time of day immediately following dinner was my sole reason for being. I was obsessed with the hardened, frozen texture of the Oreo cookie sugar cream, the pieces of chocolate cookies torn from their original form to create the landscape of brown specks that make the otherwise plain vanilla ice cream base enjoyable. Fortunately for ten-year-old me, there was only up to go from Breyer’s. As it turns out, most of their products are only frozen dairy desserts– not enough milkfat to get the Food and Drug Administration’s stamp of approval as ice cream.
The sweet treat cultural phenomenon TV shows Cake Boss and Cupcake Wars (cupcakes are a sugary snack, not a dessert) in the early 2010s dominated my teenage years. For my fourteenth birthday, I called dozens of bakeries to finally find one an hour away from our suburban-fringes North Carolina home that would take on a television-worthy confectionery challenge. I wanted a cake-based replica of the four-faced opal clock that tops the information booth at Grand Central Station set to the exact time of my birth. That year, in addition to dessert, I was also obsessed with New York City, Beaux-Arts architecture, and train stations (the latter two of which I remain dedicated to). My mother thought the price was outrageous but eventually caved and agreed to get me this enormous dessert as my birthday present and an early Christmas gift.
The order was a loss for more than just my mother’s wallet– we got a lopsided chess pawn instead of an ornate $20 million Tiffany clock. Its innards, a marbled vanilla/chocolate cake, were dry, and its shell, fondant– the secret to Cake Boss’s creations– inedible. The cherry on top of my misfortunate sundae was that only four girls showed up to my party with a cake that could feed thirty. I had just started at a new school, and with a September birthday, the friends were not yet plentiful. The cake remained in our fridge for weeks, reminding me of my social ineptitude and not to believe everything I saw on TV.
To “preserve the memory” for even longer, my mom insisted on keeping the small, pure fondant, edible gold cake topper in a small Tupperware dish for at least five years after the cake was long gone. Even when I would try to rid myself of the memory by throwing it away every few months, it would always reappear on the butter dish shelf in the fridge, fished out of the trash by my mother– from spite or good intentions, I’ll never be sure.
Because of this incident, the cake has a precarious spot in my allowable desserts hierarchy. Turtle cakes and Mississippi Mud Pies, which satisfy the complexity and texture requirements, are OK. Most cheesecakes I consider dessert if their crusts are dense and flavourful enough, even though they tend to feature fruit. Banana bread and carrot cake? Breakfast. Pineapple Upside Down and Lemon Cakes have no place in my dessert world. Other single-flavor and marbled cakes (especially those of boxed or chain-grocery-store variety) are very much out.