Floating Island pudding? A lump of meringue on a thin puddle of vanilla pudding? I’d sooner you gave me an empty plate.
That’s an excellent one. It’s not vanilla pudding, and there are berries in it. Light and delicious. Of course, I had it in France, so it they didn’t cut corners and use pudding.
It shouldn’t be vanilla pudding, it should be creme anglaise, made with the yolks of the same eggs you used for the meringue. And with cream and vanilla bean. And it’s customarily garnished with caramelized spun sugar. It’s a fair amount of work to make, but i like it a lot.
The most disappointing dessert that i often see is corporate cake. You know, the cake someone brings to the office birthday party. With sponge that tastes vaguely of plastic and frosting that is sickly sweet crisco, with some food coloring.
I generally take a piece to be polite, nibble a small bite, and discretely drop the rest into the trash.
Well, I don’t get dessert often. I’m all for pudding.
I eat it with the kids. Other adults leave to have their adult beverages.
Me and the grandwreks have loads of fun with a simple butterscotch pudding. They get a squirt of canned Reddiwhip.
Or a cookie.
Everyone’s happy. That’s the best dessert.
The worst would be vanilla ice milk. My Granny had that every night after her supper for something like 50years.
Yeech!!
The most disappointing dessert is the one that doesn’t taste as good as it should. The excellently named “corporate cake” is an awful dessert, but you know exactly what it’s going to taste like.
My nomination: a delicious-looking orange or plum that ends up being dry and mealy. The tragedy!
Oh, good point. Or the gorgeous peach that’s mealy and mushy and has no flavor.
Oh yes. We don’t normally eat unadorned fruit as a dessert - it’s usually a side dish for dinner - but crappy fruit is always an enormous letdown.
Yeah! I think oranges edge out the others just because you’ve often gone through the process of peeling it before even finding out that you’ve got a dud.
I can’t help reading this in the voice of Jon Favreau’s character from Chef:
(NSFW)
Anything from a Japanese donut shop. Immaculately decorated in a rainbow of colors you can’t wait to bite into one. Tastes like styrofoam if they treated it to keep kids from eating it.
What’s worse is when people jump in early on the potluck list for desserts (which had limited spaces) so people that make homemade desserts can’t get in on it. Then bring corporate cake or equivalent. At one school I taught at, the 6th grade teachers were notorious for this.
This reminds me of some packaged ‘sweets’ that one of our faculty members brought back from China. Little boxes of beautiful looking treats shaped like fruit - kind of like those marzipan fruits that were popular in the 70s which my mom bought to decorate cakes. But they have almost no flavor at all. Weird.
This. I had a piece of a very disappointing Christmas Cake in 1979. Round, single layer, perfectly even chocolate icing, some kind of decoration that I don’t remember. Flavor just not there. And it was in the family I was living with, so I had to smile and say “Oishii!”
On the other hand, every weekday morning during that winter, I stopped at the donut shop at the train station, and had two donuts and a cup of hot chocolate. I did not, however, get cake donuts, only raised, and they tasted properly yeasty with sugar (glazed or granulated) on the outside. They seemed to me to be just like what one gets here. In summary, Japanese seem to have (or used to have) a problem understanding western cake. But not raised donuts.
Mexican pastries. They’re very often heavy and tasteless.
Flashback time! I worked for an Egyptian company for a few years, and every single time any employee of note had a birthday, we all had to troop down to the basement meeting room for a slice from a gigantic, commercially produced cake. (I specify Egyptian because among the many delightful cultural traits the people of this country tend to share is great warmth and hospitality; of COURSE we had birthday cakes!)
Alas. The cakes were nominally attractive, having been diligently and professionally decorated with swirls of colored frosting. But the main ingredients seemed to be hydrogenated vegetable shortening, margarine, food coloring, sugar, white flour, and baking powder.
I came to dread those days, as there was no way to avoid partaking of a tasteless slice.
Unflavored for me!
Better tasteless than rancid/stale/spoiled ingredients.
One of the most disappointing desserts for me is a box of chocolates where the chocolates are combined with very powerful flavours like alcohol, orange, or loads of salt. Can’t you weirdos just buy your own supplies of alcohol/orange oil/salt for dipping and leave my perfectly good normal chocolates in peace?
Like, for instance, conchas? I have to agree, although I suspect they’re much better when eaten straight out of the oven.
I still think about this piece of chocolate cake I once got at a military chow hall. It was the most perfect looking piece of cake I have ever seen. It was perfectly square, the texture was light and it had a uniform coating of thick chocolate frosting.
After I finished my meal, I took a big bite of the cake and it had no flavor at all, tasted like air. It seemed all the parts where there, just not the flavor.