I is for Inedible, or How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Chocolate Cake

I am a picky eater, and I'm not afraid to admit it.

I don't like my food to touch. 

I don't like sweet stuff mixed with non-sweet stuff (i.e., glazed ham - gag!)

Every scrap of fat or other ookie stuff must be removed from all meat before eaten (my mother claims I have thrown away an entire cow in my lifetime of trimming, and who knows how many chickens).

I hate tomatoes. I hate, loathe, and despise celery.

I don't eat eggs in any way, shape or form, other than as something to stick cookie dough and cake batter together.

Most vegetables - meh.

There's more, but you get the idea.

Last week, my husband and I went to a very pretentious restaurant here in town for lunch. The only reason we went there, as he and I had both been there, separately, and had not particularly cared for it, was because we had a gift card. Gotta use a gift card.

We each ordered a chicken club sandwich (mine without avocado, because, yuck) with fries. After a lengthy wait, our waitress finally brought our food. And they were not sandwiches. They were wraps. I don't DISLIKE wraps, but, given there was no mention on the menu that it was going to be served as a wrap, it was a surprise. 

The next surprise was that the chicken was finely chopped and distributed among the rest of the ingredients. And that, instead of salsa, there was chopped tomatoes. CHOPPED TOMATOES. I had to do a lot of picking as I ate, but I'll admit, in spite of the tomatoes and the surprise wrap, it was fairly tasty, if you ignored that you only had about three tablespoons of chopped chicken mixed up with all the lettuce and tomatoes, rather than the chicken breast that we expected, until I took a bite and pulled out a big, slimy, curly piece of bacon fat. I willed myself not to throw up, pulled it out, and proceeded with caution.

In the meantime, my husband was analyzing his sandwich wrap, searching for avocado and not finding any.

"You always do this to me," he said. "You order yours weird with everything left off, and it makes them mess MINE up -- oh, wait, there's a piece of avocado."

One piece. One little, tiny, chopped up piece of avocado (still too much, if you ask me) in the entire wrap.

We finished our meal and asked for the check, but when it arrived, my husband said, "Great. We didn't use up all the gift card. Let's order dessert, so we don't have to feel like we have to come back here and use up the rest of it."

Our choices were tres leches cake, key lime or chocolate, or some kind of dessert chimichanga.

Pass on the chimichanga.

And I don't like citrus fruit very much, so pass on the key lime cake.

That left us with the chocolate tres leches cake. I confirmed there was no coffee in it (detest the stuff), and we waited for it to arrive.

As speed is not a trait of this restaurant, we had plenty of time to mull over our choice. Neither of us had ever had tres leches cake, but my husband had heard it was similar to a "poke" cake, where the cake is baked, holes are poked in it after it has cooled, and sweetened, condensed milk is poured over the top of that and allowed to soak in. I had enough time while we waited for it's arrival for me to Google a recipe and read a description by Ree Drummond, of The Pioneer Woman, where she referred to tres leches cake as, and I quote, something "to die for."

Bring on the tres leches cake! Besides, it's a chocolate cake. How bad can it be?

This bad.

A square of chocolate cake with a lovely chocolate frosting was sitting in a pool of milk.

Drowning in it, in fact.

The bottom of the cake had lost all of the chocolatey color, turning it nearly white.

I gingerly took a bite.

Here's what I liken it to: you know when you have a family birthday party and one of the kids doesn't eat all her cake and puts the plate with a big chunk of cake on it into the sink with the other dirty dishes and someone runs some water and the plate with the cake on it fills with water and there's a wet, cakey mess left in the sink that completely disintegrates if you try to pick it up? 

That pretty much covers the consistency of the chocolate tres leches cake. The taste was only slightly better.

I tried a second bite, taking only frosting and the top half of the piece of cake onto my fork, hoping to avoid the scraped-out-of-the-bottom-of-the-dishwater bottom half.

No improvement.

I put my fork down, disappointed.

My husband manfully ate the rest of it, saying it was okayyy, but he didn't love it.

I'm pretty sure what the Pioneer Woman meant when she said tres leches cake was "to die for" was, "I'd want to die 'fore I'd eat that wet slop they call cake."

The frosting was pretty good....