Petit fours look great but always just taste like mild sugar-flour seasoned with too much salt.
Granny would’ve loved you.
All sorts. i now stick with flan.
Heh. This would be “Sachertorte” in Vienna. It’s world famous, so of course we had to try it. Went to the so-called original venue and everything.
And then it was… fine? Wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t great either. On the dry side, mild flavor, perfectly adequate, but worthy of fame? We didn’t get the hype. Again, it wasn’t bad, but considering our elevated expectation, it has to be considered a disappointment.
(Macarons at Ladurée in Paris, now, that fulfilled expectation.)
Summer Pudding - a dome of wet bread notionally enclosing a collection of undersweetened berries, but the filling is often realised as sort of sour fruit mush that is 50% pips.
Our friends/neighbors have an apple orchard, and also a small peach orchard. Any day now their peaches will be available for a tragically short time and then I’ll be grilling peaches every evening for dessert.
I love cheesecake. We just finished eating one a friend gave me as a July fourth gift. But the worst dessert is when a friend has us over for dinner and the dessert is a “cheesecake”; some no-bake monstrosity that I’d be embarrassed to serve.
Bitting into a chocolate chip cookie only to discover it’s an oatmeal raisin cookie! 
They may be, but I have never seen them served hot and fresh. Cold they are dry and not so sweet. Its my understanding that they are meant to be dunked in coffee, in which case they are excellant as it brings the flavor out.
The Bimba ones they sell packaged are somewhat softer and sweeter, I believe meant as a treat for children.
And since no one has mentioned it, fruitcake sucks.
Man, I’m in firm disagreement with so many examples, from the OP (Île Flottante is the bomb ) to @Mangetout (I’ve never had a bad summer pudding - but then, I’ve only had ones I made myself. Where it’s either brioche or even sponge for the shell, and the filling is Bing cherry-biased)
For me, it’s New York cheesecake - what a crumbly heavy perversion of all that should be light and airy - and Key lime pie - not the tart lemon meringue variant I was expecting, but some kind of overly-sweet condensed-milk abomination.
Oh, man. I love those two. The cheesecake recipe I use is Rose “Insanity Rose” Levy Beranbaum’s recipe: in her book, she rhapsodizes about NY cheesecake and then offers this recipe, which I made as my groom-cake at my wedding:
It’s not crumbly, though. IMO, if NY cheesecake is crumbly, that means it’s been overbaked.
And a good key lime pie is pretty tart, but not necessarily meringuey.
My entry for “most disappointing dessert” was something made by a woman my dad was dating when I was maybe 15. She brought a container of these delicacies on a picnic, and I couldn’t quite tell what they were, but they looked a bit like slices of Little Debbie Swiss Rolls–thin chocolate on the outside, some sort of vanilla cream on the inside.
I snagged one and popped it in my mouth, and that was the day I learned about onigiri.
And the close relative, the corporate cookie. There’s a certain nautical-themed brand of chocolate chip cookie that my dad used to love-- I’d bring him a package whenever I’d visit. They are about the blandest, most tasteless cookie ever. Also there’s a very well-known rhyming brand of CCC that is similarly bland and bad. How do you make chocolate chip cookies not taste very good? Make the most basic from-scratch CCC recipe and it will be 1000 times better than those.
I love onigiri, but yeah, if you buy into one expecting chocolate and sweet, that would be a disappointment.
I like those, too. But if you are expecting something fluffy, they must be an unpleasant surprise.
I’ve never had summer pudding, but i adore berries, and a plate of mostly cooked berries sounds like a win, even if i had to eat around the soft bread crust.
I think I’d take summer pudding more seriously if:
- The bread is cake
- The fruit is seedless
- There is sufficient sweetness to balance the acidity of the fruit
- The juice/liquid is gelled
But then if it’s made that way, it’s half a trifle; why not make a trifle?
Too trifling to trifle with, I guess.
That’s a fantastic name, because it looks and tastes like it was made based on a requirements document of some kind, not an actual culinary recipe.
“The cake must have a pleasing appearance, covered uniformly with 1/4” frosting"
“The cake must taste like the primary flavoring associated with the name”
“The frosting must be no less than 40% sugar by volume.”
And as a result, you get a cake that ticks all the boxes that a cake should tick, but isn’t actually very good when you come right down to it.
Our office cakes usually come from a bakery that actually knows how to make cakes that taste good, unlike corporate cakes from just about every other bakery. A few Mondays ago, we had a retirement celebration for somebody, but that particular bakery is closed on Mondays. That meant that the cake came from a different place. I took about two bites of my slice, and the rest of it ended up in the rubbish bin.
Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with oatmeal raisin cookies, and sometimes, they’re just what I’m in the mood for… but they’re absolutely nothing like chocolate chip, and when chocolate chip is what you’re in the mood for (which is pretty often), biting into a raisin just makes things worse.
The corporate cake I can’t understand, meanwhile, is marble cake. If you like chocolate, get a chocolate cake. If you don’t like chocolate, get a white cake. If you’re serving to a group and some folks like chocolate and some folks don’t, then get a cake that’s chocolate on one side and white on the other. Marble cake disappoints everyone. Especially when you carefully choose a piece that looks like it at least has more chocolate than the others, and all of the chocolate you see turns out to be a thin layer near the surface, and it’s mostly plain.
Strawberries. Haven’t tasted a sweet one in years.
Really ruins chocolate dipped strawberries.
Everyone is talking about tasteless desserts, my most disappointing dessert is quite the opposite. When Dove Magnum Ice Cream Bars first came out I could hardly wait to get one. I love Dove’s dark chocolate so that encasing vanilla ice cream had to be amazing. Wrong! The chocolate coating was too thick and waaaaay too sweet. Even the ice cream seemed too sweet. I couldn’t even finish it. How disappointing.