Dateline: July 2012. I receive an email about muffin-sized s'mores and subsequently lose my damn mind. I haven't had a s'more since I was a wee li'l tyke. But $55 after shipping is a rough sell for a confectionary that I'll be enjoying by my lonesome. Fast forward a mere fifteen months and God finds a way to do right by a fella. It is officially s'muffin time! Except on Sundays and Mondays which forced me to implement a colon before an open parenthesis on all of my social media updates. Otherwise known as a sad face.
Dateline: The Tuesday after not being able to go on Sunday or Monday. After working overnight and having the stench of specialty confectionary conquest failure permeating my every thought, a few co-workers and I hit the road for forty minutes...FORTY DAMN MINUTES to get our hands on a dozen of these damn s'muffins and we were still an hour early because the same food lust (flust?) that demands you don't check a shop's availability on a Monday is the same flust (...nah, food lust) that allows you to repeat that mistake the next day. With an hour to burn, it was only natural to kill some time in the local smoke shop and since I don't smoke, it was only that much more natural to not have anything to do. Thirty down, my buddies are happy, thirty to go, and we meet Melissa.
We enter Melissa's lovely establishment, Essential Chocolate Desserts, and in-between a delightfully warm exchange of cordiality and a surreal lack of self-control on my part, I pick out EIGHT different cake truffles. There was blueberry, carrot cake, chocolate peanut butter, chocolate covered in milk chocolate, red velvet, something involving lemon I don't remember, and they all had the same thing in common: with every bite, I hated Melissa. I hated Melissa because I knew she owned me. With every concurrent gnaw of my molars, I lost control of another string. To say that her treats are rich is borderline insulting. Her baseline is decadent and from there, she begins ascension. Yet nothing I ate was overwhelming or "too" anything. She was even kind enough to give me a cup of milk with my order to help wash down the shame of pre-noon, mini-cake binging. On that day, Melissa from Essential Chocolate Desserts became my chocolate Geppetto, which, if she was a black male into D/s play, I'd have far larger issues to discuss. The clock struck noon and though I adored the company of my chocolatier domina, it was time to part ways as my confectionary quest was centered around Carmen.
Carmen Lindner is the proprietress of Gotta Have S'mores, which, fifteen months ago I received an email about and vowed to try. That vow would be honored on this day. Though they can be shipped, the few retailers that carry them predominately deal in singles and half-dozens. The only one I saw that also sold them by the dozen was the Platine Bakery down the street from my newly beloved Melissa and since I'm not a punk, that's where we went. If you include the hype from the email I got, the anticipation that came from not getting them the previous day, and the moderately lingering trance I was still under from Melissa's cake truffles, a lot of pressure was on Carmen and her mini-muffin sized s'mores to deliver. They are packaged with a variety of milk chocolate, white chocolate, and caramel s'muffins and EVEN AT THE RETAIL LEVEL, THEY ARE SOLD REFRIGERATED. It's not a bad thing but I'd prefer you not go in with false pretenses. I dropped a little less than $30 for my dozen, my colleagues dropped roughly half of that for their six each, and the moment of reckoning had arrived.
My roommate was very clear on the fact that he was not a "muffin guy", so the endgame of this trip for him didn't mean nearly as much as it did to me. My other colleague just likes good food which meant he was all in regardless. Thus, it was no surprise that he went first. After taking his first bite, there was some type of moan typically equated with the sounds of human reproduction and I knew it would be okay to give one of mine a shot. I bit into a white chocolate one and when asked which one I had, I tried to say "white chocolate" but it was surely muffled by the graham cracker base that partially fell out of my mouth since the euphoria I was in lightly numbed my jaw. I was able to snap out of it in time to see my reluctant roommate take a bite of his caramel one. His reaction was quite the whirlwind that began with a gravelly "Oooooohhhhhh!", that transitioned into his lightly skipping down the street, and closed with him walking back and shooting the Platine Bakery the meanest look I've ever seen a human being give a bakery that sold him a third-party confection that they enjoyed. In the exact same way that I hated Melissa, he now hated Carmen. Because love wasn't a strong enough emotion for what their respective confections did to us. We were hooked. Later that week, I gave two to another co-worker, and combined, we ran through sixteen s'muffins in less than a week. Embarrassingly, it was time to re-up.
Dateline: Saturday of the same damn week. Ridiculous... The original stop on our s'muffin quest was a place on Redondo Beach near our hotel named Made By Meg, a small bistro run by chef/caterer-ess/overall bad ass, Meg Hall. When we overzealously tried on Monday, they were closed. But this wasn't Monday, and we needed our fix. When we initially walked into the bistro, I panicked because I pushed a door clearly labelled "Pull" and knew that this wasn't going to be a good first impression. I subsequently overreact, grab my s'muffins out of the cooler, and shoot Meg, who cordially greets us, arguably the most uncomfortable smile I can muster. She then rings me up for my s'muffins and asks if I'd like anything else and as I take a look at the menu, my work colleague who just got a new camera is snapping pictures like a maniac at anything that would be considered remotely interesting. In what was hands down, the sweetest way I've ever heard anyone paraphrase "What the hell are you doing?", Meg asks him if he's a blogger and once he explains the situation, she just lets him continue to do his thing. I finally decide on (what I believe was) the grilled flank steak with soy chile glaze & vanilla bean sweet potatoes. After a few minutes, I receive my dish to go and we head to the car to put up our newly acquired s'muffins and head to the beach. I sit down, take a bite of the meal, and give a second fork to my colleagues as I walk back inside to personally fawn over this woman's cooking. I typically don't care for sweet & salty/spicy combinations but I took a risk and came up aces with this one. The tenderness and juicy flavor of the grilled steak flowed seamlessly into the light sweetness of the sweet potato/vanilla bean which rolled into what was just the right amount of heat of what I think were scallions but I'm not certain. All of the flavor transitions had such a smooth fluidity and rolled back and forth into each other like the feeling one gets riding a swing. Instead of saying any of this to her directly, I believe I just said, "Wow!" which was followed by me muttering some other incoherent nonsense and her graciously accepting my praise and inviting me to come back for her Two For Tuesday promotion. Which I hope to do while still here.
If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, these women must have carte blanche as it pertains to suitors. They have all found a way to not only create culinary masterpieces, but to find their own niche in a place where over saturation can make it easy to get lost in the shuffle. I'm grateful for the chance to try all of their artwork and hope for the chance to do so again. I wish them all continued success and if anyone reading this gets a chance to travel to Southern California, don't dare hesitate to try all three.
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