Sweetness
The stories behind my seven favorite desserts.
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In my last essay I said that the next one would be a doozie. This isn’t it! That one is such a doozie it won’t be ready till next month.
In the meantime, here’s this one—which was, as always, a lot of fun to write—and please enjoy with a slice, or a spoonful, or a piece of your favorite dessert. Bon appetit!
This essay is dedicated to the memory of my beloved aunt, Mary Dozier Ellsworth, who died on May 16, 2023. She was one of the most generous and selfless people you could ever hope to call family. Never asking for credit, all her years of hard work behind the scenes are the reason all those meals with the cousins were so looked forward to. She is dearly missed.
What’s your favorite dessert?
My all-time favorite dessert is probably the last item on this list, because there’s nothing quite like it, but to be honest, there’s nothing like any of these things, since they represent moments in my life that are of specific places and specific times.
What makes them the sweetest—and makes them feel like home—is the love surrounding them. Some of these stories are about romantic love, some are about familial love, or love for discovering new cultures in small, yet life-altering moments, or love for myself as I’m growing and changing. And, when it comes down to it, love is at the center of what we mean when we talk about home.
Though this essay contains seven dessert vignettes (and doesn’t that lovely word even sound like a dessert?), it’s incomplete. I didn’t mention the classic desserts of my household growing up (parfaits and strawberry shortcake and chocolate eclairs), or the best brownie in the whole world, from August First Bakery in Burlington, Vermont, or the best pies in the whole world, from Poorhouse Pies in Underhill, Vermont (if you’ve never tried a Maple Cream Pie you haven’t experienced life as a New Englander).
I started to write about the heat of the Western North Carolina woods in July 2002, sharing popsicles with two people I would fall in love with, at different times and in different ways, I just didn’t know it yet. And the twin sweet memories of the first time my daughter tried ice cream (neither was Ben and Jerry’s, sorry, guys)! A maple creemee on the Burlington waterfront and homemade blueberry ice cream from Charlotte Berry Farm are both special, but I feel like I just told the whole story of those times in one sentence apiece.
Sometimes the sweet becomes sour with time. I’m not ready to talk about those Applebee’s cheesecake chimichangas in 1999 (though I should have known!), or the circumstances before and after the picture above was taken, a great 26th birthday celebration in Brooklyn in 2005. You can’t always separate the good from the bad, and it takes time to extract those rancid nuts from the cookies (or separate the cream from the milk, or some other such metaphor).
But there are a few instances here where I can still have the sweet, even given the light of day and what would become of these moments. I think stories are better when they’re complicated.
You can have your cake and eat it, too, as long as you understand that nothing is ever perfect. (Except for number seven)!
And now, in chronological order, seven sweet mini-stories that feel like home.
JELLO, Cool Whip, and angel food cake, West Columbia, South Carolina, many times between 1983-1997.
Ah, Sunday dinners in the South! It was a lucky day that post-church, my family would travel half an hour to my cousins’ house by the wooded Saluda river to eat a delicious home-cooked meal prepared by my aunt. Spaghetti pie (like macaroni and cheese, but better, made with spaghetti noodles and tons of butter), ham or turkey, rice and gravy, biscuits, ambrosia “salad”—all were staples at these meals, and after dining at the kids’ table, the four cousins would run outside to explore the woods or play baseball until one of us came back crying because another one hurt our feelings.
Ah, the life of adventurous ’80s kids!
The not-so-lucky Sundays involved eating leftovers at home. But other Sundays—not the luckiest, but not the worst, either—would entail going to my Great Aunt Margaret and Great Uncle Charles’ house, where we were typically expected to behave (even though we found our own ways around it).
Aunt Margaret and Uncle Charles and Great-Grandmother MeMe (until her death at age 95) lived together in a modest house in a quiet neighborhood off the highway on the way to the zoo, where the grass was parched year round, and the home decor inside the house—along with Aunt Margaret’s fashion—had not changed since the 1970s.
Whether their house was fun or not would always depend on the cousins. If it was just me and my brother we got insanely bored. Even still, we’d pull out this styrofoam pallet of toy cars that lived under the living room couch and at Christmas, all the cheesily creepy ’70s decorations came out in full force.
All of us cousins have had the conversation, time and time again, of finding out that our Great Aunt and Great Uncle were not married to one another, but siblings. And the tale of the “Keepsake 1978” Fruitcake is one for the ages (but it does not make this list).
Dessert was always highly anticipated, not because it was anything special—it was frankly the opposite—but it meant that the meal was officially over and us kids were free to slide our bodies under the large dining room table, tablecloth hanging to the floor, and play underneath, tickling the ankles of the adults.
And the grand finale was…JELLO! Usually Red flavor, and served with a dollop of Cool Whip on top. We’d also be dished up a slice of very dry, very bland angel food cake, kind of a cross between a pillow and a dish sponge, which was never quite sweet enough or desserty enough, but maybe if we kept taking bites, it would eventually taste like cake should?
This house was the only place we’d ever eat this combination of sweets, surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling palate of orange, brown, yellow, and pea green. It was quintessentially old-fashioned, every bit of it, and it turns out I miss it, and my grumpy relatives, too.
Peppermint ice cream, Camp Lutheridge, Asheville, North Carolina, July 1994.
“Christmas in July” week at Lutheridge was the best week of my summer—no, the whole year—for eight years running. Always taking place during the week of July 25th, the camp’s halls would get decked with garland, lights, “snow” (baby powder), ornaments, the works. We’d sing carols while walking the trails, study Gospel verses relating to Jesus’ birth, and on Christmas morning, would give one another “presents” (usually little wonky bracelets or mushroom-shaped candles made in Crafts).
On the last night of camp, Friday’s meal was a traditional Christmas dinner. Turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls, and bottomless sweet tea (it’s the South, after all).
Lineberger Dining Hall, with its high-pitched ceiling and linoleum floor, could seat 500 people at once, and it was always packed to capacity for this special meal, the walls vibrating with the treble of hundreds of excited campers, who would depart after the meal for the camp dance or Water Olympics. Some of the counselors would even dress up in ties and Sunday dresses to celebrate the moment.
It was always the best night of the week, and for me, the best night of my whole year.
The highlight of the meal, though, was a dessert that was only ever served once all summer long: peppermint ice cream. It could have been a scoop of Sealtest Vanilla, jabbed with a stick of peppermint from last Christmas, but it didn’t matter. The collective joy of the community, the rarity of this one treat, and that single peppermint stick was dreamed about all day long.
For me, one year in particular stands out above all the rest: 1994. I was still 14 for a couple more weeks, and I had a crush on this kid named Alex, who was funny and cute (we’d bonded over a shared appreciation for Stone Temple Pilots’ new album) and just a little bit chubby. Even though it wasn’t a big deal at all, his chubbiness would come up a lot in cabin conversation. This was the week that an older girl taught me the saying, The more the cushion, the harder the pushin’, which seems like an appropriate thing to learn at summer camp.
Alex was sitting with his group a few tables away. As I looked out across a sea of faces, all of us singing “Silent Night,” lights down low, I was enraptured. Butterflies shrieked in my stomach. I thought he was so beautiful that I just might throw up.
I would think about this moment later that fall, while watching my whole life unfold on screen in My So-Called Life, when Angela Chase delivers the line, “You’re so beautiful it hurts to look at you.”
I didn’t throw up that night. Instead, I enjoyed my peppermint ice cream just like everyone else.
And then I went to a dance, and danced with a boy.
Panna Cotta, somewhere in the countryside of England, April 1996.
I had the brilliant opportunity to visit London during my junior year of high school. There were only five of us on the trip: me, my close friends Anna, Tim, and Emily, and our favorite English teacher, Mrs. Jackson. It was the perfect cohort.
It was my first time traveling internationally, and maybe only my second time on an airplane. I was leaving my home for something wildly new. Even if it was just for a week, I knew I would come back changed.
1996 was the peak of Britpop. Visiting Britain during that time meant going directly to the source, and I was all about it. Oasis blasted through my headphones as I tried to sleep over the Atlantic. Everything in London—the chocolate, the clothes, the streets, even the trash—was worlds cooler, on a different planet even, than what I had been exposed to in South Carolina.
Our group joined other high schoolers from the far-flung states of Ohio and New Mexico; this was my first introduction to anyone from those two places, which was eye-opening in itself. All told, there were maybe twenty of us students and teachers and our tour guides, a good size group for getting to know each other and the incredible country around us.
The trip held many incredible experiences. Cathedrals, cathedrals, and more cathedrals, baths in Bath and a treasured find in a music store there, lots of walking on cobblestone streets, visiting museums, and popping into castles. My pictures from this time reflect how I was trying to be “artsy” so they’re all pretty weird.
After seeing sign after sign in the city for a mysterious new play called “Trainspotting” the four of us went to see it (we didn’t know that it was based on a novel by Irvine Welsh, and that the film would premiere that summer and be misquoted by posters in college dorms for the next half-decade). Even from our nosebleed seats, we got an eyeful during the scene where Renton drops his pants to find his last viable vein for his heroin addiction.
I was sixteen and it was freaking amazing.
I don’t remember much about the food, other than at Covent Garden I partook in a particularly delicious baked potato, drenched in butter and garlic and cheese. But there’s one other thing I ate that I’ve never forgotten.
During one of our forays to the English countryside, our tour bus stopped at a little cottage. The small stone building could have been hundreds of years old, providing respite and drink for weary travelers since the Middle Ages, but now was a fine restaurant with white tablecloths and a gift shop.
We arrived and places were already set, and after whatever delightful meal we were served, the waiters brought out dessert: little plates holding something soft and cool, creamy and white, each spoonful a sweet surprise.
Tasting it was like a dream I hadn’t known I wanted to come true until that moment.
For more than fifteen years, the name of what I had eaten that day was a complete mystery to me. Then in a restaurant in Bristol, Vermont, I saw it—That’s the dessert!—on someone else’s table.
It was called panna cotta. And it all came back to me, that slippery sweet cream, from a place like Brigadoon, when I was becoming someone new.
Hot chocolate in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 1997.
My second time out of the country was back to London and then to Scotland with my high school drama club to perform our play, “A Company of Wayward Saints.” We stayed in dorms at the University of Edinburgh with about two dozen other American high school theatre groups and essentially had the time of our lives.
The short version of this saga is that us teenagers from South Carolina were paired with a high school in Boise, Idaho, and we all got to be best friends. There was quite a bit of South Carolina/Idaho cross-pollination; our group had a lot of girls and their group had a lot of boys, so there you have it.
It was on the four-hour train ride between London and Edinburgh that all of this began, and that’s when I was introduced to Jeremy. He had a spray of freckles across his face, blond hair, dancing green eyes. In retrospect, he looked a lot like Ron Howard in Happy Days, albeit with smaller ears and more of a leading-man grin, but with that same fresh-scrubbed, boy howdy look.
A few days into the trip, our group of South Carolina thespians was in the audience for the Idaho performance. Theirs was a musical and Jeremy played the title role. During the songs, his eyes bored into mine when he would deliver each and every line.
For the next hour and a half, I had the exhausting task of composing my face with the proper expressions for each zany line or songburst he threw at me. People turned their heads to see who he was looking at so intently. Some of the freshman boys sitting nearby, who were basically my little brothers, snickered.
It was totally embarrassing but I was secretly flattered. I’d been starved for this kind of attention my whole life. Bring It On.
A few days later, on my 18th birthday, he and another guy, Neli, asked me and Emily out (both Emily and Tim from the previous trip were here, too. Samemily?) on a double date to this little coffee shop they had been raving about. Earlier that afternoon, they told us they had a surprise for us.
“Close your eyes,” Jeremy said, as he led us up the stairs to their room.
My eyes opened, and all the Idaho guys were there, smiling, a fleet of Birthday Knights. Neli, maybe in a bit over his head, handed a red-faced Emily a sweet little clump of daisies.
Jeremy placed a bouquet of two dozen red roses into my arms. “Happy 18th birthday,” he said, and kissed me on both cheeks.
At the coffee shop, the interior glowed mistily, a soft, rosy light enveloping us. On the small round table between us were four enormous bowls of hot chocolate, topped with oversized dollops of fresh whipped cream, and a little plate of ginger snap cookies.
The hot cocoa was sweet, as perfect a love potion as any wizard could concoct. The ginger cookie was the kind that sticks to your teeth longer than it should, the spice lingering on the tongue like a memory.
When Jeremy departed from my company, he kissed my hand, looked right in my eyes, and said, “It was a pleasure...as always.”
Despite being overwhelmed by his romantic gestures, I was still confused. All I wanted, all I needed, in order to confirm that he actually did like me, was for him to hold my hand.
He never did.
I think I know why. But I know exactly why I didn’t try, either.
Two nights later, I tossed those twenty-four roses out my window, watched them flutter three stories down and settle, broken, next to Emily’s daisies and someone’s crumpled Holy Bible.
Was it melodramatic? You bet your firkin it was.
I wrote about all of it in my journal: those beautifully sad, dead flowers, representing so much hope and promise, juxtaposed with the daggers and swords inscribed with Celtic knots that the Idahoans bought as souvenirs.
It’s a snapshot of the story of a gaggle of obnoxious American theater kids, who, every night, take over the same pub and embarrass the locals right out the door. By day, they perform their plays; one, a farce utilizing character tropes hearkening back to the 16th century Italian art form of commedia dell’arte; the other, also a farce, based on a comic strip started in 1965 about the Wild West, and would be considered ethnically insensitive today (to put it mildly).
These teenagers, on the precipice of adulthood, were trying on freedom in a different country where the drinking age was three years sooner and one felt naked if not holding a lit cigarette when making their way from Point A to Point B. Most of the food was underwhelming, fish at breakfast and boiled eggs, too, and haggis at the pub, if one dared.
The jet lag and the hormones and the time capsule of those ten days in paradise made everything feel like a dream, and a complicated one at that.
But that magical night in a little cafe in Edinburgh will always have the best hot chocolate—and the best birthday—in the entire world.
Carrot cake cupcakes, Flagstaff, Arizona, January 2007.
What’s the most romantic dessert?
For me, it depends on the weather. In hot weather, there’s nothing more romantic than a popsicle. Popsicles are so romantic because summertime is simply the best time of year, especially young summers in the Carolinas, which entailed sprinklers, parades, the hot sun and the cool AC, day camps, overnight camps, limitless potential for what the days could hold. A popsicle was always, in itself, a little celebration amongst a two month-long roll of celebrations.
But in cold weather, I have a different winner for the “most romantic dessert”: Carrot cake.
Led by a not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting, a successful version of a carrot cake is delightfully moist and made with warm spices, walnuts or pecans (nutritious), and carrots and raisins (very nutritious!). It’s the perfect balance of decadent and practical.
If there was a dessert version of that oh-so-cozy feeling of being wrapped in a warm blanket, carrot cake would take the cake!
I’d started dating someone in late fall 2006, during my third year living in Flagstaff, Arizona, and I’d told him about baby carrots and the poetry I’d written about those little nubs of glory, so one snowy winter’s night he showed up on my doorstep bearing a dozen homemade carrot cake cupcakes.
He’d gotten the recipe from his hippie roommate, and shredded the carrots and chopped the nuts himself. There was a sweet note; it showed that he had been listening. It was the kind of romantic gesture with layers, much like the different ingredients he’d included in the cupcakes, and his cupcakes quickly made their way to my heart.
I ended up marrying him two years later. At our wedding reception, there was really no other choice for the cake. It was going to be carrot. And while the dessert spread looked absolutely beautiful, the sweltering July day was not so kind to the aesthetics of such a homey confection.
Ah, maybe we should’ve gone with popsicles!
A Vermonster in the parking lot of Ben and Jerry’s, South Burlington, Vermont, August 2009.
My first summer as Camp DREAM Director had concluded, and my coworker Steve and I went in on a Vermonster for the whole staff to share. The Vermonster, if you’ve never heard of it, is a plastic bucket containing twenty scoops of ice cream, four bananas, three cookies, one brownie, hot fudge, caramel, nuts, candy and sprinkle toppings, and whipped cream. It’s just as ridiculous and massive as it sounds!
We all sat at one of the picnic tables outside of the Ben and Jerry’s corporate offices (where our own office was located), digging through a mountain of gooeyness. For seven people sharing small spaces with mice and porcupines and grimy children all summer, it wasn’t terribly far-fetched that our spoons and germs would be commingling in that slowly melting pile of sweetness.
It’s a tradition that I forgot to continue until about six summers later, but I still remember that first time, bellies aching after awhile, not sure we could finish it off, concluding an exhausting but happy summer in the Vermont woods.
Kouign Amann in Montreal, Quebec, many times between 2010-2019.
I didn’t save the best for last on purpose—these stories are simply chronological—but this magical combination of sugar, butter, and flour is, truly, The Best Dessert Ever.
The pastry is called Kouign Amann (pronounced like “Queen Ahmmahn”) and it originated in Brittany, France; the name is Breton for “cake” (kouign) and “butter” (amann). And since I’ve sadly never been to France, the next best thing was Montreal, just a two-hour drive from our apartment in Burlington, Vermont.
We can’t quite recall how we found out about Kouing Amann Patisserie (it’s not a typo–they spell it differently), a small, brightly painted bakery in the Mont Royal neighborhood. But no matter. After trying it once, the bakery became a destination, an entire reason to make the trip to the foreign country next door and bring friends and family along every time we’d visit.
To buy one, you have to have exact change in Canadian dollars. You can get a whole one for 32$ and a slice for about three loonies. Make sure you know a little bit of French before ordering. All my years of French were not for naught, as I had thought—it would come swimming back to me after just a few hours in the city, and I’d impress myself with my (probably really terrible) accent, but I could order “une Kouign Amann entier” and at least try to believe the baker thought I was a local. We reveled in being in another country, so close to home that we can just pop in for an overnight trip, yet still be swept 3,000 miles away to France.
That first bite! The first salty-sweet crack of the caramelized sugar, and the sheen of butter oozing from every layer, understanding completely why life is a beautiful, rare gift, and that humans are magic, in many ways, but especially this one way, that they can create such a flawless work of art.
You can watch a nice little two-minute video here that shows how they lovingly make their pastries—including what is basically a pallet of butter for the Kouign Amann, no skimping here!
My experience at Kouing Amann isn’t just one moment, but a compendium of moments that express the belief that sheer perfection in food is rare but attainable, and how food from a culture not your own can help you better understand yourself.
It’s been four years and I can still taste the last one I ate, that deep sense memory carved inside of me. The next time I eat it, it will feel like a hello to an old friend.
On se revoit, Kouign Amann!
Reflection questions:
What is your favorite dessert ever? Is there a story behind it?
What is the sweet that feels the most like home to you?
Is there a past sweet experience with a dessert that now feels sour? Why?
And finally: cake or pie?
West Columbia, South Carolina is located on the land of the Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) and Congaree nations.
Asheville, North Carolina is located on the land of the Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East), S’atsoyaha (Yuchi), and Miccosukee peoples.
South Burlington, Vermont is located on the land of the Wabanaki and N’dakina (Abenaki) nations.
Northern Arizona and the Flagstaff area are home to many Indigenous tribes: the Havasupai, San Juan Southern Paiute, Hopi, Diné (Navajo), Hualapai, Kaibab-Paiute peoples have all lived here for centuries. Many others are deeply connected to this area. Here is a map of federally recognized tribes across the state.
Montreal, Quebec is located on the land of the Haudenosaunee and Mohawk peoples.
Image: My 26th birthday, Brooklyn, 2005. Photo by Laurie Rhoney.
Love this trip down dessert memory lane. OMG, I remember being so jealous of y’all’s trips to the UK. Sounds as awesome as I imagined. , I also had a melted cake fiasco at my first wedding - the cake lady couldn’t get into the reception place and the cake wilted in her van in the hot August sun. One of my favorite dessert experiences ever was in the crypt at St Martins in the Fields near Trafalgar Sq. in 2005. My first time with custard and baked apple. It was Heaven.