There is no food more depressing than disappointing ice cream. I say “disappointing” and not “bad”, because “bad” ice cream can be good, actually. The bar a >$1 Hoodsie cup has to clear to count as “good” is a lot lower than the bar a $5 scoop of premium handmade ice cream has to clear. And if the Hoodsie cup somehow stumbles—say if it’s missing the traditional wooden spoon—your day will go on. No guarantees on what happens when the gourmet ice cream disappoints.

The more astute amongst you have probably figured out by now that I had some disappointing ice cream recently. Ice cream is not a lifelong passion of mine. In my earlier years, I thought it was fine, but barring the occasional Blizzard from the Dairy Queen in the mall, I never really sought it out myself. Even when the ice cream man came around, I was more likely to hit up a snow cone than a waffle cone. But somewhere around my 30th birthday, I grew a real taste for Haagen-Dazs, probably because my cystic fibrosis related diabetes made it a forbidden treat. Fast forward about a decade and my late night weekend desserts are spent studying the scripture of the one true prophet, Tom Carvel.

But I also like new things, so my wife and I have taken to trying out different ice cream joints each week. We ended up at one this weekend that I will not name, but was not good. We should have known what to expect when on a decently warm Saturday night in August, we were the only ones in the place (by way of comparison, Carvel was white hot).

We had looked at the menu before going, our minds reeling with the truly impressive number of both hard and soft ice cream flavors. But, you know, “jack of all trades” and all that.

I stuck with the hard ice cream, because my heart knows the truth of soft ice cream: it was perfected by the king of kings, Tom Carvel. I had two scoops of Caramel Cinnamon Crunch ice cream, which was essentially ice cream with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and caramel swirls. My wife had the soft serve Tiramisu ice cream.

Before our arrival, we had wondered how they managed to have so many soft serve flavors. The answer was they used a machine that dispensed an unflavored base and then swirled some flavor into the ice cream after it was already in the cup. I will not pretend to know the intricacies of the chemistry of soft serve ice cream, but I can tell you how it doesn’t work. If the flavor isn’t in there by the time the cream hits the cup, just throw it out.

Before getting into my ice cream, I will add the caveat that I didn’t actually get to eat it until the next day. Part of the fun of diabetes is having to do a bunch of math before I eat if I want to have something carb-y and the numbers just didn’t add up on the first day. I wish they didn’t the next day either.

My most shameful quality is that I think ice cream tastes best with a plastic spoon. I’m not proud of the number of single use spoons I’ve used because it completes the experience, but each of us is a work in progress. But not even a cheap spoon could save the mixture in front of me. It was some kind of frozen milk contraption that tasted like it had been walked through a room that carried a vague sent of cinnamon. I recognized the soggy, chewy Cinnamon Toast Crunch pieces by look alone and I’ll be goddamned if I could taste any caramel. I paid $7 for roughly two scoops of this Invasion of the Ice Cream Snatchers replicant of a real dessert, so I continued to eat it even though each bite brought me ever so closer to running at the nearest wall as fast as I could in the vain hope that the impact would help me to forget. Luckily, I ran out of “ice cream” before I pulled a Wile E. Coyote on the living room wall.

I could only think of the famous Wonder Woman Ice Cream panel and wonder what would have become of our world if she tried this crap.

Things I Like

Sometimes when scrolling through the vast oceans of digital music available at the tap of a finger an old friend will break the surface.

I ended up listening to a ton of Morgana Lefay this week. They’re a Swedish band that plays a chunky, mid paced form of metal that I often see referred to as Power Metal, but that label doesn’t do justice to how aggressive they can be. Also, vocalist Charles Rytkönen is one of the best to ever do it.

They are one of a handful of bands that I discovered in the first heady days of file sharing, so the age and time that I discovered them makes me wholly unqualified to judge them objectively. That being said, I think they play metal in one of it’s purest forms. I often wondered why there weren’t more bands like them, but the Apple Music algorithm answered that for me: many have tried, most have failed. Turns out its real easy to make Kirkland brand Morgana Lefay music. There’s just something that sets the real thing apart.

For the record, the band I stumbled across back in the day was actually Lefay, which is a spinoff of Morgana Lefay that shares only a vocalist and a guitar player, but I kind of consider it all the same well anyway. If you’ve never heard them, give their 2005 comeback album Grand Materia a listen; the song “My Funeral is Calling” has been running through my head for the entire week. But I celebrate the whole catalog and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the absolute hours I’ve spent playing along the “Master of the Masquerade” of their Maleficium album.