Cioccolati Italiani - Milano

With only two full days in Milan, I needed a strategy to maximize my gelati intake. The resulting strategy: focus on chocolate and eat as many flavors as possible in one sitting. On my first day, having gotten up before 8 am and powered through Da Vinci's Last Supper and Sant'Ambrogio (including paying homage to his relics, i.e. robed skeleton), I rewarded myself for a productive morning with a visit to Cioccolati Italiani at 10:30 a.m. Pictured above is a cold chocolate (cioccolato freddo) and a degustazione known as la storia del cioccolato. I couldn't eat/drink them all fast enough so I ended up with some soupy bits, but I attacked the best ones first, remaining cold enough to give me brain freeze. The highlight was the 70% Venezuelan chocolate with the 70% or 65% Nicaraguan putting in a decent showing. My least favorite was 45% Papau New Guinea (or some Pacific island), but that was only because it was milk chocolate. I didn't understand the chocolate that was flavored with Sicilian oranges since the orange taste was not discernible, but just as well since I don't like citrus with my chocolate. I'm a bit removed in time now to remember the specific taste, but I do remember after eating all of it that I fell into a happy chocolate stupor daze that persisted longer than the typical happy feeling I experience while and immediately after eating chocolate. It was probably the cumulative effect of all that dark chocolate.

The next evening, I regretted that I had not eaten gelato ALL DAY and decided to have gelato for dinner. I went to Choco Cult and had a scoop of cioccolato peperoncino and a scoop of dark chocolate fondue. The two scoops combined were probably the size of half of my face. I found a park bench and proceeded to do damage control by madly licking the gelati before it melted. It was an interesting combination of savory and sweet and definitely a meal in and of itself. Kind of like if I were to eat at a kosher dairy restaurant...maybe?

Score: 7 types of chocolate gelati in less than 48 hours. Vacation success!

Crumbs, Washington, D.C.

A few qualifiers, also known as damning with faint praise:

1. A cupcake, when done well, can be beautiful to look at and tasty...but in and of itself, is not a complex confection.
2. New York has an obsession with cupcakes that has infected DC, for the better in the case of Georgetown Cupcake, which should represent the minimum standard for cupcakes (and the fact that it represents what cupcakers aspire to as the gold standard is a sad reflection of the masses' standard);
3. I will try almost anything at least once and, like the child to whom cereal box prizes appeal, novel gimmicks will entice me every time.

After dinner at Busboys and Poets with my high school friends, one of them suggested a cupcakery in Penn Quarter called Crumbs, with original outposts in New York. The catch with these cupcakes was that they were filled. Excellent, I thought in my head, the more elements the better. Less may be more in architecture, but not necessarily in pastries.

We arrived towards the end of the evening so the selection was limited. Having bought Rocky Road ice cream earlier in the week, my cupcake of choice was the S'more; I like to have a theme running through my dessert selections at any given point in time. A s'more, which would be one of the few things that I could tempt me to camp, is melted chocolate and marshmallow sandwiched between graham crackers. In this case, it was a chocolate cake with marshmallow fluff filling, topped with chocolate icing, and two graham crackers flanking a line of three marshmallows. The cake was somewhat moist and aerated, but at least not memorable for being terrible (both the cupcakes and the cake slices at Cake Love are too dense, even when served at room temperature), the icing was not overly sweet but not buttercream alas, and the topping was well presented. I was lukewarm about the marshmallow fluff. I wonder if it is possible to sprinkle little marshmallow pieces throughout the cake batter, preserving their soft, marshmallow integrity? That might have been a better embodiment of the marshmallow component of a s'more. The textures of the marshmallow fluff and cake were too much like oil and vinegar mixing...perhaps a marshmallow mousse next time? But thumbs up to Crumbs for the creative attempt!