Dessert

I would tell a tragic tale of which there is now more to tell.

When I was a wee lass in high school it was a tradition for the choir members to go to Applebee's after a concert. My most favorite thing on their menu (next to mozzarella sticks, I'm sure) was something called Apple Chimi Cheesecake. As you can see from the picture it was basically cheesecake and glazed apples rolled up in some flaky pastry, covered in cinnamon sugar, and served with vanilla ice cream. It was pretty fantastic. When I moved to Boise my senior year of high school, they discontinued this menu item.

Until I was 17 years old, I lived in Pocatello, Idaho. When we were on vacation or making a day-trip to a bigger city, one of my very favorite places to go was then called Johnny Carino's. They had a dessert called lemon delicacy, the likes of which I have never since tasted. Back then it even rivaled my life-long passion for cheesecake. It was a dome-shaped dessert and the perfect blend of tart glaze, sweet cream, and moist cake. Lemon, lemon, lemon. By the time I moved to a city with a Carino's in it, this dessert was discontinued, as well. (And don't you even for one second think that Carino's current lemon cream cake or Olive Garden's lemon cream cake come even CLOSE to what this baby used to be.) (I couldn't find a picture of this old favorite.)

I'm not exactly sure when I started developing a greater love for all things "Italian," but it had to have been before high school graduation. During choir tour my sophomore year of high school my Uncle Kent and Aunt Jennifer took some of my friends and cousins out for dessert at a Macaroni Grill in California. I tried my first cannoli. I don't remember what my opinion of it was at the time, but two years later at high school graduation I really wanted to try another one. Not very many places sell them, so my parents took me to the Macaroni Grill in Boise after my graduation ceremony because we knew we could find them there. They had discontinued making and selling cannoli. In this case I don't want to give the impression that cannoli was my favorite dessert, but what was disappointing about this was that I had wanted to try another one for so long and they are so hard to find that even the place I thought I could count on stopped serving them.

So as far as I can tell, these three of my favorites were all discontinued within a year of each other (2006-2007), and I've never seen them since.

Now it is 2013. I had my wisdom teeth out on Thursday, and when my dad went into Albertson's I asked him to look for Ben & Jerry's Creme Brulee. While I was at college in Rexburg the Albertson's there sold this Ben & Jerry's flavor, and I loved it. I don't normally shop at the Albertson's here in Boise, but I had looked for this flavor at WinCo, Wal-mart, Fred Meyer, the Boise Co-op, and anywhere else I ever happened to be looking for ice cream over the last few years. My dad said he couldn't find it, and I was disappointed because I assumed that Albertson's would carry it here if it carried it there. (He bought me a pint of stracciatella, though, which is my favorite flavor of gelato, so I was appeased for a while.) I told my friend Jillian about it, and she went to work looking for it and discovered that Ben & Jerry discontinued this flavor a year ago. 

I must have some sort of peculiar, unpopular taste. Bummer.

Well, my dad bought an ice cream maker, so I can attempt to figure out my own frozen creme brulee. I may have to make a mission of recreating the lemon delicacy, though. That will take some work. Challenge accepted.