Chapter Sixteen: I Come To Bury the Food Police, Not Praise Them
I think we can agree that I love food.
Not all food.
Mostly cake. And potato salad. Deviled eggs. Donuts. Steak. Shrimp. Crab legs too.
But if I had to pick a perfect food. It would be cake. Of course chocolate cake is the bomb diggity.
Whatever that is.
Who am I kidding?! I know what bomb diggity is.
I’m 40. Not 50.
Gawd forbid a million times.
But I’m not cake racist. I like
all cake. As long as it’s moist. And delicious. Which is how it is that I came to fall in love with the most incredible piece of cake food ever imagined in the minds of man.
And this is the story of That Cake.
We were feeling wild on our next to the last day in Disney World. We had no real plans for the day. Our only ADR was for lunch. So that was the only place we planned to be.
You have to admire a family whose entire day is built around a meal.
If statistics can be believed, then at least 47% of the people reading this have also built a day’s itinerary around a meal.
We got into the Magic Kingdom in time to ride a few rides in Fantasyland. And then we made our way to the Liberty Tree Tavern.
Before I go any further I want to make this painfully clear: I AM
NOT RECOMMENDING YOU EAT A MEAL AT LIBERTY TREE TAVERN. Our experience there was based on the menu that existed last September. The menu has changed some since then and most importantly, the dessert menu has been altered. Like Joan Rivers. Disfigured beyond belief.
But on this day in September, all was still right with the world. Obama was still the face of hope, Hillary! was still the inevitable candidate and Alabama was still undefeated.
And the Liberty Tree Tavern was still serving
Butter Grilled Pound Cake.
A moment please.
How good is it? I took a picture of it. That's how good it is. I have NEVER taken a picture of food. NOFoodPictureTakingPeople. But after only one bite, I knew. I knew I had to capture the moment.
You know, it doesn’t even sound good, does it? Pound cake?! What is this Sara Lee? Who are you, my grandmother? Are we 80 something? (NOPres.McCain). Who in their right mind gets giddy over poundcake?!
The same morons who make reservations for lunch 180 days before they’re going to eat it.
I blame both George Bush and global warming for this.
But really, it was a friend of mine who had recently sampled the gooey goodness of
Butter Grilled Pound Cake and told me about it. This friend knows I’d walk barefoot 1,000 miles on broken glass, eating nothing but broccoli and drinking nothing but Tang even while being forced to listen to Laura Brannigan’s greatest hit on my iPod, if it meant I’d get to savor a nice piece of cake at the end. This friend knows me
well.
I’m such a cake zealot that I’ve actually snuck an extra piece of birthday cake out of the refrigerator at work between the 3:00 cake party and 5:00 when the birthday girl went home for the day. When we have cake at home and I go to slice myself a piece, I also take a bonus slice to eat on my way to the table or the couch or wherever it is I’m going to eat my cake. Sometimes, I’ll offer to help clean up so I can score an extra piece of cake when I’m in the kitchen. Cleaning up.
Right about now you’re wondering, what’s the frequency, Kenneth?
And if you're not, it's only because you're not getting enough REM sleep.
Our meal at LTT was good. I had the crab cake appetizer and although it wasn’t succulent, it wasn’t suckulous either. Yet another less violent conjugation of suck. I can’t remember what I had for my main course. But I’m sure it too had parents.
And then dessert came.
And I ordered up the
Butter Grilled Pound Cake.
The waitress nodded reverently. She
knew. She knew I was about to sample a food so rich, so delicious that they’d have to carry me out on a stretcher.
We waited what felt like an eternity and then she brought it out. A chorus of angels sang out hallelujahs as it was placed in front of me. Perhaps it’s just my memory of the moment, but it seemed like there was actually a spotlight on the bowl as the waitress placed it down on the table. Probably just my mind playing tricks, right?
They serve it with a big spoon, by the way. Which is both practical and ironic.
Butter Grilled Pound Cake is smothered in a caramel pecan sauce that is not too heavy or too overpowering. It’s the most perfect blend of flavors and textures. Moist, dense, buttery cake, softly sweet caramel sauce with a hint of pecan flavor. Indeed, the entire experience of
Butter Grilled Pound Cake is perfection. It’s the end of the 1994 Alabama Auburn game, it’s
Piano Man, it’s Yoo Hoo, it’s George W. Bush after 9/11 and before the war in Iraq, it’s landing on the moon, it’s a Cadillac CTS, it’s the 1992 Crimson Tide, it’s the 1980 USA Olympic Hockey Team, it’s Joshua Tree, it’s my freshman year at Alabama, it’s my senior year at Alabama, it’s the act one finale of
Les Miserables, it’s having the right girl just smile at you, it’s
Rudy, it’s
Saving Private Ryan, it's
Apollo 13, it’s a drive through the mountains on an early fall day, it’s the sound of the ocean slamming into the rugged coastline, it’s a good apple, it’s Soarin’, it’s Test Track, It’s “Paging Mr. Morrow, Mr. Tom Morrow,” it’s
A Separate Peace, it’s
Huck Finn, it’s
Seinfeld, Frasier, Cheers and
West Wing, it’s
Saturday Night Live with Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey, it’s
The Stranger, it’s
Freebird, it’s
Live Like You Were Dying, it’s
I Go Back, it’s hanging out with your best friends the night before you graduate high school, it’s sitting on the steps of Comer Hall after you’ve finished your last exam, it’s Free Dining, it’s your seeing your little girl’s face when she spots Mickey Mouse and runs to him, it’s
Walking in Memphis, it’s
The Color Green, it’s my wife saying “yes,” it’s seeing my girls being born. Yes,
Butter Grilled Pound Cake is the confluence of all good things.
Or was.
Butter Grilled Pound Cake, like affordable healthcare, like “made in America,” like Johnny Carson, like Paul W. “Bear” Bryant, like Must See TV, like national unity, like Constitutional literacy, like post-racial, transcendent politics (whatever that means), like getting dressed up to fly, like $.85 a gallon gas, like casette tapes, like touch screen computers in EPCOT that you could make dinner reservations at, like making same day dinner reservations in Disney World, like competent cast members, like Disney’s toll free number, like affordable
stroller rentals, like ticket books, like River Country, like Horizons, like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, like Communicore, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, like the Skyway, like my friend from Montana, like Auburn’s 6 game win streak, like personal responsibility, like Ashclan’s “W Is For Women” pin, like Frickles’ copy of
Math for Dummies, like LaLa’s husband’s fanny pack, like NicoleMarie’s weather forecasts, like Mel HappyHat’s so-called witty ripostes, like MasterGracie’s “Blame it all on Bush” thread, like Chapter 11 counting LaLa’s vomit references, like old Disney commercials that no one but you seems to remember, like being told that you know that she knows that you know that she knows, like Michael Moore’s waistline, like Jimmy Carter’s relevance, like standing in line at the Safeway without having to listen to the person behind you on her cell phone describe her date the night before and like Elvis, is gone.
Why? Why is it gone? I don’t know for sure, but I have my suspicions. As you probably know, Disney has a new Healthy Eating Initiative. A group of our superiors have decided that we should eat healthier. On vacation. So Disney has been trimming the fat, cutting the calories and doing other things to mess up the menus. Trans fats, like global warming, must be eliminated! And just like global warming, the “science” that “proved” these nefarious trans fats were causing health problems was less certain than the intelligence that concluded Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
So Disney balanced the fat budget. Ohana took sausage off the menu and replaced it with shrimp. Whispering Canyon also lost the sausage. Buns are now a wheat/white mix, pastas are whole grain. And
Butter Grilled Pound Cake got cut out all together. And on and on it goes. If only Marie Antoinette were a dining cast member.
I’m not against healthy eating. Although I don’t prefer to do it. I just don’t think it should be forced on us. Like flourescent light bulbs. I think we should have options. Sometimes I actually
do prefer fruit and I’ve been known to crave veggies. Preferably in a buttery cheese sauce. But it picks me off to be on vacation and craving a delicious sweet treat and instead be offered up a sugar free bowl of jello.
If the death of
Butter Grilled Pound Cake is not the work of the nefarious fat cutting food nazis, then it is surely the work of the bean counters who’ve figured out a cheaper dessert alternative. Because these days, Disney doesn’t make any move that doesn’t make them money. If there is a cheaper dessert then can charge more money for, you bet they axed the
Butter Grilled Pound Cake in favor of it.
So either way you cut it, they won’t be serving my newest favorite dessert at Disney World anymore. And does it really matter whether it was the work of fat obsessed food fascists, or bean counting buffoons? No.
Now I understand that I’m more cake obsessed than the average bear. Right after Disney killed the
Butter Grilled Pound Cake, I posted a thread about it on the Restaurant Board. I was roundly castigated for my reaction. Some folks were a little hostile. If you can imagine that. I freely concede that I’m more food focused then some people, but this isn’t about food.
It’s about cake. And what that cake represents. Fact is, Disney World is the sum of its parts. It’s the Monorail, it’s the Polynesian, it’s Space Mountain, it’s the parade. The music. The fireworks. The smells. The food. Can you imagine a trip to Disney World without “Por favor mantengase alejado de las puertas”? No you can’t.
I remember when Resort TV did away with the Zippa De Doo Dah tip for the day. I was genuinely sad the first time we checked into our room after it was gone. It just wasn’t the same. That music was Disney World to me in a way that Stacey’s Top Seven is for a whole other group of people.
I developed a similar connection with
Butter Grilled Pound Cake as I did with the Zippa De Doo Dah tip for the day. Even though I only got to sample it once. Just once.
It was cake, dadgumit.
And it was good.
It was better than good.
And now that it has been properly eulogized. The search for the next big thing continues.
___
Click Here For Chapter Seventeen:
Ugh...I have never hated a character more. 
) - Zzub, are we getting another installment?!...the story isn't over yet, is it??! I've lost track of where we are in terms of your posting schedule.
That was a great one, LaLa!
cuz it Looks Yummy! You gave it the best eulogy I think I've ever seen given to a cake
only to have it immediately snatched away from you by the food police.
