Saturday, November 6, 2010

Coming soon to a table near you

From the WSJ I have just learnt about the cherpumple as a prospect for holiday meals. Not only is it too much dessert, it’s too much information.

In case your clicking finger is broken, a cherpumple is three whole pies—cherry, pumpkin & apple—baked into three cake layers—white, yellow & spice, respectively. Then it’s glued together with cream cheese frosting.

This is just plain wrong on so many levels. For one thing, pumpkin pie is slimy & disgusting all on its own. I’ve made it a couple of times for holiday dinners, but I’ve never been able to gag down more than a single forkful.

I think my chief objection—aside from the sheer excess—is the amount of work involved. Even though the cherpumple inventor uses frozen pies & cake mixes, you have bake the pies, then wrangle them into their respective cake layers & bake again.

Plus, apparently it’s a crap shoot as to whether the thing is actually baked through.

Then you have to assemble it with “three tall tubs of cream cheese frosting” & hope to God it doesn’t collapse on you or slide off in three different directions. I mean—cakes are supposed to be light; imagine what the layers are like with a pie in each of them? We’re not talking about the ground-up Styrofoam crème-like filling in a Hostess Sno Ball here.

The article says all this folderol can take up to three days.

& when you’re done with all that, what have you got? Something at least 83% of your friends aren’t going to touch with a barge pole, much less a fork.

With the holiday season fast approaching, here's a hope: that you don’t have anyone in your life who’d put a cherpumple on the table in the expectation you’ll eat it.

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