So you're walking through your neighborhood, trying to decide where to go for dinner and kinda tired of all the usual choices, when you notice a new place you hadn't seen before. It beckons to you the way a mudhole calls to a three-year-old in Sunday finery, whispering of forbidden delights heretofore unknown to your poor senses numbed by mediocrity. Excited, you give it a try and it is a revelation. Every morsel throws a new penalty flag on your taste buds for excessive jubilation. You walk out the door energized, already forseeing many future returns to your new favorite haunt. The next time you visit, the doors are boarded up and the place is emptier than Wrigley Field in the post season.
Perhaps you buy into the ballyhoo of a new fall television program. You set your Season Pass or, among the hoi polloi, schedule your Friday evening around the show. You get sucked in by the quality writing, delightful plotting, and chemistry among the cast. You can't wait to see how the show's mysteries unfold over time, how the bread crumbs of future developments ever-so-carefully doled out come to fruition in due course. The show becomes a highlight of your viewing week. And then WHAM, before the season's half over, the plug gets pulled and you're left mourning what might have been.
Well, then, you understand how I feel about Häagen Dazs Caramel Cone Explosion ice cream. Available on the American market for a brief time a few years ago as part of their "Extraas" line, Caramel Cone Explosion was quite simply the best ice cream flavor ever. It even eclipsed Ben & Jerry's defunct but sublime Rainforest Crunch (the victim of rising South American nut prices and a heinous maybe-they-won't-notice metamorphosis into Dilbert's World Totally Nuts), the previous title holder. Just how good was Caramel Cone Explosion? A single cup had as much artery-clogging saturated fat (20 grams) as two McDonald's Quarter Pounders with Cheese. Oooooooh, baby.
But just as suddenly as it appeared, Caramel Cone Explosion went away. Not since the unexpected disappearance of the PBMax candy bar-- the most divine chocolate-and-peanut-butter concoction ever to grace the planet-- had I been so traumatized. What is it with the sugar barons at these confection conglomerates? Are we just toys to them? Mere playthings to be teased at their whim? "Here, my pretty-- have some live-giving oxygen. Drink deeply of its sweet purity. Now gasp in wretched, unending agony as I take it away forever."
So you can imagine my joy as, stealing a glance at the ice cream case en route to suckling once again at the Tater Tot teat, I espied a new flavor in the Häagen-Dazs section: Caramel Cone. Apparently explosions are no longer a marketing coup in a post 9/11 world, or perhaps almonds were a catalyst to the explosive effect and, lacking nuts in its new incarnation, the company elected not to promise what it could not deliver. Be that as it may, the essence of the flavor has returned and I rejoice.
I cannot, however, tell you how it compares to its ancestor. First, because in claiming the follicles from atop my head the mists of time have seemingly also stolen my memories of bygone flavors. Second, because I have not yet sampled the new apple in my supermarket's frozen garden of Eden. I'm wise to their tricks now. Fool me once, and all that. I'm sure Caramel Cone will be on the shelves just long enough to send me into spasms of insulin withdrawal when the company fiendishly discontinues the product.
And third, I've moved on. Dissatisfied with the prepackaged options I took matters into my own hands and got myself an ice cream machine. When Caramel Cone sang and smiled I lashed myself to the milk, cream, and almonds in my basket and sailed clear of the ice cream case completely, setting course for a batch of homemade toasted almond ice cream.
Let 'em try and pull cream off the market.
Posted by Peter at March 14, 2005 7:14 PM