Dessert Advice
By Brad Pike
Make Desserts at Home
In order to maximize value and quality, it’s best to make desserts at home. While Chips Ahoy and Oreos may offer instant gratification, waiting just an extra 10 minutes for ready-bake cookies will exponentially increase taste satisfaction. They will be warm, soft, and delicious, and you will say, “I made an excellent dessert decision today,” to no one in particular because you live alone in a basement. Likewise, with milkshakes, just a three dollar carton of ice cream and a half gallon of milk can produce several days’ worth of milkshakes compared to one four dollar milkshake from Dairy Queen.
Create a Diverse Inventory
As a child/teenager, I kept a jumbo sized Ziploc bag of candy outside in the bushes, another in a cabinet, another in a drawer, and another in a bowl on top of the fridge. You see, I can quickly exhaust a dessert supply, but I also have a terrible memory, so by hiding candy in various places, I would cunningly deceive myself into thinking I was in a candy famine and then when I opened a random cabinet — hey look, it’s that candy I forgot! What a delightful surprise from myself to myself! I love me!
Make sure to diversify your dessert inventory as well: cookies, cakes, chocolate bars, donuts, etc.
Repetition of a specific dessert texture/flavor will deaden your appreciation for it, so it’s best to have a wide variety. At this very moment, I have gum, candy, milkshakes, and brownies, and they each serve a different dietary purpose: gum is for chewing during thought intensive tasks, candy is for late at night, brownie is for breakfast, and milkshake is for after dinner.
Cupcake Sandwich
Make no mistake; I have a deep abiding passion for the culinary masterpiece that is the cupcake. After all, the cupcake is the iPod of cake—portable, fashionable, perfectly sized for the busy urban dweller who can’t be hauling a birthday cake everywhere in case an unexpected cake craving (ca-kraving) should strike. However, there’s a fundamental design flaw to the cupcake: the mound of frosting on top. During oral insertion, the frosting poof rubs against the user’s nose and/or upper lip, smearing all willy-nilly, exposing the user to the jeers of judgmental healthy people who think you might develop diabetes before you’re 25, those goddamn carrot eating idiots.
To avoid a frosting smudge, simple tear off the bottom half of the cupcake and smoosh it on top like a sandwich.
The cupcake’s under control now. It’s subjugated to your will. You’re in command of the cupcake eating experience, and you decide what body parts may or may not get frosting on them, not the cupcake. With this method, no one will ever suspect how many cupcakes you might be eating — one a day, five a day, 10 a day? Your diet could consist of exclusively cupcakes, and no one would ever know except you, your local bakery cashier, and your endocrinologist.
Cupcake Milkshakes
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with milkshakes, unlocking their hidden potential via additives like brownies, caramel, sprinkles, and Reese’s peanut butter cups. While most people consider a milkshake simply ice cream and milk, its possibilities are limited only by your imagination. The other day, I added a chocolate cupcake for a mix of soft and creamy textures. The blue frosting made the whole sloppy mess blue like the bantha milk Luke Skywalker drinks with his Aunt and Uncle. The milk had also gone bad, which gave it a sharp tang, mmm.
Milkshakes save you the unnecessary caloric expenditure of chewing a cupcake, scooping ice cream with a spoon, bringing material to the mouth hole, etc.
In just a few moments, you can suck down an entire ice cream carton through a straw (Straws are a crucial component to the milkshake drinking process; I can’t stress this enough). Also, you can dump the milkshake into a two gallon pitcher, store the pitcher in the fridge, and drink it throughout the day.
Cookie Brownie
Sometimes you want cookies and brownies, but you can’t have both, no you can’t possibly have both, it would be profligate and gluttonous in the extreme to have both—wrong. You can indeed have brownie and cookie together, you dumb idiot. To engineer this chocolaty conduit to a universe of pure magical joy, simply bake brownies for 15 minutes, and then add teaspoon sized dots of cookie dough across the top, followed by another fifteen minutes or so.
Assuming you utilized the requisite full stick or so of butter, the resulting confection will be a gastronomic triumph, a mind-blowing flavor wonderland.
In fact, since we’re on a roll, why not go one step further and throw the cookie brownies into a blender with vanilla ice cream, milk, and a cupcake to make a cookie brownie cupcake milkshake? Fill a two gallon jug with your cookie brownie cupcake milkshake and drink it all day every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Fill the void inside you with cookie brownie cupcake milkshake; yes, fill it all the way full with cookie brownie cupcake milkshake. Love can be recreated in dessert form, and cookie brownie cupcake milkshake is proof.