Bakery Fakery & Dubious Desserts

If a picture is worth a thousand words to readers, then for some bakeries and restaurants, a real 3-D representation of their food is worth a 1000 calories to their eaters right? More and more restaurants are not just making tasty food to eat, but they are offering up ‘demonstrator’ plates of entrees, breads, and desserts to entice you to buy and try new things. You know you’ve seen them near the menu board – an attractive meal or bread loaf all ready to go except that it is made of plastic or rubber.

Some of the fake desserts can look amazingly realistic and appetizing, which is the idea to help influence you to buy the real versions. When my kid was young we enjoyed playing together with her plastic fake food too. Yeah I would always look forward to my daughter serving up a hard plastic quartered waffle with butter pats, a syrup jug and a silver percolator full of simulated coffee. 1st generation toy foods for kids were pretty much limited to single color molded plastic. The kids would have to use their imagination so that ‘bright red wedge’ became a slice of pizza. But today, even toy foods have become amazingly realistic.

My wife recently attended a fancy function and the chef had prepared an attractive vanilla dessert cup with just a touch of thick caramel and chocolate syrup drizzles on top to make it look top drawer. It was served with a small fan of dark chocolate bark shoved in the side along a festive green mint leaf. My wife said it looked beautiful but as a fan of plain vanilla AND very dark chocolate, she said it tasted even better. One gentleman at my wife’s table took a bite of the ice cream but grimaced and was not impressed. He called the server over and asked for her to take the dessert away and bring him a cup of coffee instead.

In the meantime, my wife was later told that the chef was aghast because he had misplaced his ice cream dessert display cup that he had made. It was simply a realistic representation of the dessert for the servers to show the patrons. Though the chocolate and mint leaf were real, the ice cream was scooped from pure white shortening so as to hold its shape and texture during the dinner service. Apparently the poor guy at my wife’s table had just eaten a mouthful of SATURATED FAT! Though ice cream will never be the preferred medium for frying tater tots, isn’t it nice to know that REAL ice cream is still a healthier choice for dessert that the fake stuff?