August 12, 2005

Guess what? I've discovered that, at Cold Stone Creamery, home of the 4 Millions Ads Featuring Twenty-Something Women Holding Up Huge Cones of Ice Cream That They Would Never Ever Ever Actually Eat as well as Every Preppy Middle Schooler From the Lake Tuscaloosa Area Trying to Convince You That Their Parents Aren't Parked Around the Corner, they have this substance called “Sinless Sweet Cream.” It's called “sinless” because it's low fat and no sugar added, making it, in the imagination of me, carb-friendly. Of course, I don't really know what it means by “no sugar added.” As far as I know, it means that, from the time they opened the box of pure sugar from the factory and placed it in the display case, they added no additional sugar. It may mean that they added plenty of honey. After all, if it's really both low fat and low carb, what's left? Sodium? So, it's reasonable to assume that “no sugar added” is some Clintonian way of saying “chock full of carbohydrate evil,” but when I go to Cold Stone, I am not feeling reasonable so much.

At Cold Stone they make a really big deal about the “mix-ins,” because they can charge $0.49 for each one when the whole tub of walnuts cost a fraction of a cent. I know they don't technically advertise huge profit margins (The ads could read something like, “The margins are the most delicious part!” says the supermodel holding five pounds of ice cream in a giant waffle cone three feet away from her as if thinking, “Here, fatty, why don't you take this?”), but I'm just being cynical, or maybe realistic. There's also a certain indefinable appeal to watching that hapless teenage worker mix and mash a ball of monounsaturated fat in front of you with those big masher thingies. Maybe that 49 cents goes to labor. It probably does, considering I'm not personally ever tipping them. This is because, when you put money in the tip jar at Cold Stone, the staff immediately begins to punish you by singing a cute little song. Well, consider me successfully discouraged.

At least there's Sinless Sweet Cream now. (Have you noticed that the religio-moral status of food is a win-win situation? The dessert could be the “Satanic Chocolate Cake of Decadaent Debauchery” or the “The Immaculately Conceived Virgin Cheesecake of Grace and Light” and people would still order it with extra spoons.) We can add that to the list of “carb-friendly” desserts now available in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The list is not long enough, really.

For example, take Papa's College Custard, a little ice cream on 13 th Street that honestly thought that things sound better when they sound British (mmm… clotted cream… toad-in-the-hole…). I mean, scones are delicious, but from the sound of the word, you would think they are things you throw through windows to deliver threatening notes to people. And naming ice cream a word that's only one letter away from a spicy substance associated with sausages? No no no no no. Nothing pleasant rhymes with “custard,” or even almost rhymes with “custard.” Within the word itself it has “cuss” and “tard” in it.

Nonetheless, Papa's College Custard offers some occasionally wonderful low carb custards that, in this case, I'm pretty sure are actually low carb. This is because one day I ordered a chocolate low carb milkshake, which they delivered promptly but without the benefit of the “shake” aspect, so the low carb chocolate flavoring had all collected at the bottom of the cup, like cigarette tar in those model lungs from your health class. And man I struggled to pull that stuff through the straw. I had to work, using sucking muscles I didn't even know I had. And then, after about fifteen minutes, when it finally came out the other end of the straw, I discovered exactly how sugar free this custard was. And let me tell you, every ounce of that shake deserved to be called custard.

There's also the famous low carb “turtle” ice cream at the Ice Cream Club in Northport, which is absolutely wonderful because, I am certain, it contains 70g of sugar per 5g of ice cream. How can they get away with this? Well, the “ice cream” part of it is probably sugar free. It's the “turtle,” or caramel drizzles and chocolate chunks, that you have to watch out for! I'm not sure, though, how I could possibly claim false advertising for this company. “Your Honor,” I could say, “they put sugar in this alleged ‘low-carb' ice cream! I know because I've eaten it on 576 separate occasions!” It's not false advertising if the sucker is willfully self-deceptive, after all.

I imagine T.G.I. Friday's (not represented in Tuscaloosa ) could make a fortune if it put out a low carb version of its Brownie Obsession. It wouldn't be a tough change. All they would have to do is take a regular Brownie Obsession, with all the trimmings, and serve it with green spoons. No one wants to believe its low carb anymore than the girls who will be making daily trips to the restaurant to eat it.

I consider myself something of an expert on low carb desserts, considering that, even when our pantry and refrigerator are as empty as the Hall of Presidents during, well, ever, our freezer always has about eight gallons of sugar-free rocky road, extra fat. Where the rest of the expert went, I don't know.