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An Open Letter to Bakeries Around the Globe

Friday, September 25, 2015 | 0 Comment(s)

Dear Bakeries,

Let me begin by buttering you up, it seems apropos. I love your work. Hell, I've loved your work right into a larger waistline.  I appreciate that you have to wake up before all those people who wake up super early in order to provide them warm, often crackling, golden doughy goodness. And the filo dough, I mean, shut the fuck up that is so tasty. And with the layering, and maybe some honey. Shit, this is already turning into an advertisement for bakeries worldwide. But that's not what this is. This is a plea.

Many of you provide a category of baked good that goes by many names: Cinnamon rolls, Coffee rolls, or Sticky buns. This is not the complete list.  Again, let me pause to commend you on your decision to concoct such delectables -- they are all excellent.  I realize that pastry chefs are appalled that I can't tell the difference between each independent sweet in this category, but the truth is I choose to see what makes things alike more than to dwell on their differences, because I'm morally superior.

*drool*
Among these coffee rolls (yup, that's what I'm calling all of em) we find more divisiveness.  The greatest division; Greater than the Crocs debate and perhaps even more enflamed than Uggs' controversy. The line in the sand is, of course, raisins versus no raisins.  While I reluctantly agree that coffee rolls may contain raisins, I'm not at all happy about it.  It is an abomination.  A perverse joke composed of desiccated grapes rubbing elbows with such kings and queens of taste the likes of brown sugar, cinnamon sugar, and melted sugar.  Raisins and cinnamon hardly mix (I'm looking at you cinnamon raisin bagels), but we can all agree that raisins are the odd man out of the coffee roll equation.  They're weird, and not in a positive sense.  At all.

When I look at a cinnamon roll with raisins, this is what I see.
Here comes the plea.  If you make coffee rolls, and you choose, despite my best efforts and your better judgements to add raisins, please please please make those raisins visible to the consumer. I'm specifically talking about putting at least a few raisins sprinkled on top.  As a warning.  Cause raisins are that bad in this situation.

I don't eat a lot of donuts and coffee rolls.  At least I try my best not to. I find these particularly glucose-filled delights are best left as occasional treats or rewards. So when I do purchase a swirl of sugary pastry, I begin salivating much like the streams of liquid that drip from my pitties mouth as he waits for the command to "eat."  It's a special moment.

For this reason, nothing gets me quite as ragefull as biting into the doughy outer arm of my swirl only to have my front teeth pop the wrinkled skin of dead fruit hiding inside the caked on brown sugar and cinnamon.  THERE SHOULD BE A LAW AGAINST THIS!!!!  While I admit to suffering the constant worry over the possibility that their may be fruit in my cinnamon roll, to hide those fuckers within the folds with no clear markings denoting their existence is simply immoral. It's immoral.  I'm saying it makes you a bad person. So knock that shit off.

An Unfillable Hole

Friday, September 11, 2015 | 0 Comment(s)

The first time I went to college I was 17.

Something about the pure joy of teenaged freedom must have disagreed with me, because I immediately fell ill with mononucleosis.  I did not get it the fun way.  It makes total sense that I had trouble digesting the sweet nectar of freedom after my parent's strict and unconditional love.   I had led a drug-free, out on a school night-free, having friends over-free lifestyle. Yes, alcohol is a drug.

If you add these straight-laced policies to the fact that, at the time, I was rolling into school each day wearing a yarmulke and talit katan hanging down the sides of my wide-whale corduroys, you should get the picture that, for me, high school was not "the best time of my life."  I mean, who doesn't imagine their optimal high school experience as escaping the people in their hometown to hang out with their youth group friends an hour's drive away in upstate New York.

I envisioned college as an everyday upstate New York, and I had been desperate to inhabit that space for the past two years.  But, like any drama worth its mustard, this play would have two acts.  The particular strand of mono that infected me clogged my insides for a feverish two months.  My failing body forced me to take a medical deferral and return the next fall.

Artist rendering: But the green color is accurate