Everybody loves a dessert

An Eton Mess can be a good thing: 10 odd dessert names

Image: Frederick Medina

Nobody raised an eyebrow or batted an eyelash when the lemon ice cream was introduced to the world. After all, the name was explanatory enough to describe its subject: it was a lemon-flavored ice cream, and that’s all there was to it. But what about the Floating Island? Or the Angel Food cake? One can only wonder what a dinner party guest would imagine when the host announced that the chosen dessert was called Summer Berry Grunt. Listed below you will find ten oddly chosen names for desserts, for your perusal. So, read on, and see if any one of these tempts you!

Image: Enrique Briseno

Truth be told, the name sounds more ominous than it should. A grunt is a cobbler that's slow-cooked on the stovetop, or in a slow-cooker. Supposedly, the name comes from the sound the berries make as the dish cooks.

A Summer Berry Grunt is a delicious and easy-to-make dessert. The summer berries add a sweet and tart flavor to the filling, making it ideal for the warmer months.

Image: Yi Mun Loo

A dessert with a quite spectacular name, the Floating Island is a dessert consisting of meringue floating on a vanilla custard. The meringue used is baked in a vessel over warm water. It can be served at room temperature or chilled.

Eggs in Snow is a similar dessert where the meringue is shaped into egg-sized pieces and poached, rather than in one large baked piece. A 1771 letter from Benjamin Franklin reported "At dinner had a floating island", meaning that it was a special treat even back then. Also, an 1847 American cookbook lists Floating Island as a Fourth of July celebration dessert.

Image: Nathalie Jolie

Angel Food cake is a type of sponge cake made with egg whites, flour, and sugar. It differs from other cakes because it uses no butter. The aerated texture that gives this dessert its name comes from whipped egg white.

Angel food cake is usually baked in a tall, round pan with a tube up the center that allows the cake batter to rise higher by 'clinging' to all sides of the pan. It is always sound advice to cut Angel food cake with a serrated blade since the straight-edged blade tends to compress the cake rather than slice it.

Image: Brina Blum

Platz is the German word for "place". But, of course, an Apple Platz is not a park made of apples. The Apple Platz is a simple and sweetly satisfying dessert that tastes like a cross between apple crisp, coffee cake, and apple cake.

The topping is crumbly, rich, and sugary, while the apple filling is jammy and infused with cinnamon flavor.

Image: Chinh Le Duc

A clafoutis is a French dessert that can assume the appearance of crisp, Yorkshire pudding-like creations and custardy flans, but all topped with a layer of seasonal fruit.

Clafoutis traditionally uses unpitted fruit arranged in a buttered dish, covered with a thick but pourable batter, then baked to create a crustless tart. The clafoutis is traditionally dusted with powdered sugar and served warm, sometimes with cream, as a dessert.

Image: Hisu lee

Aside from the pejorative term, a fool can also refer to an English dessert. Commonly, fruit fools are made by folding puréed stewed fruit into sweet custard. Modern fool recipes often use whipped cream instead of custard.

Many authors believe the name "fool" derives from the French verb fouler meaning "to crush" or "to press". The name trifle was also originally applied to the dish, with the two names being used, for a time, interchangeably. In the late 16th century, a trifle was 'a dish composed of cream boiled with various ingredients'.

Image: Carissa Gan

A dessert named after its messy appearance, the Eton Mess is a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries or other berries, meringue, and whipped cream. It is commonly believed to originate from Eton College and is served at the annual cricket match against the pupils of Harrow School.

Aside from referring to the appearance of the dessert, the word mess may be used in the sense of "a quantity of food", particularly "a prepared dish of soft food" or "a mixture of ingredients cooked or eaten together".

Image: Honey Fangs

A buckle is a mix of fruit and cake baked together, somewhat similar to a cobbler, with a streusel topping. As it bakes the fruit and streusel topping makes the cake "buckle."

This silky, moist cake can be studded with any seasonal fruit and is topped off with a buttery crumb topping, a blood orange glaze, and just a pinch of sea salt.

Image: Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦

For those who never heard of it, a Brown Betty is a traditional American dessert made from fruit, usually apple, but also berries or pears and sweetened crumbs.

Similar to a cobbler or apple crisp, the fruit is baked, and, in this case, the sweetened crumbs are placed in layers between the fruit. It is usually served with lemon sauce or whipped cream.

Image: Clint Patterson

Another variation of the omnipresent cobbler uses johnnycakes as its base in place of biscuit or pie dough to produce a cobbler with a rustic cornbread feel.

This old-fashioned, colonial dessert with a cornmeal biscuit topping can include peaches and plums, or whichever stone fruit is in season, to make an excellent dessert.

ALL THINGS VINTAGE WERE ONCE NEW, RIGHT?

Do You Remember These 10 Food Brands No Longer Around?

Image: Nik

Few things are more comforting and nostalgia-inducing than the foods we used to eat when we were kids. That includes the flavors, the package designs, and, especially, the brands that are no longer around.

Many prestigious and cherished names have gone the way of the Dodo a long time ago but there are always cases that linger in our memory. In this list, we have dug up ten examples of such treasures. Do you remember any of them?

Image: Clem Onojeghuo

Not many cookies can claim to be as famous and successful as Girl Scout cookies. And the old-school brand Burry's Biscuit Co. was just that. That is how big they were. The brand was created in the late 19th century and was a big name in the cookie and cracker industry for decades.

Its factory in New Jersey was the largest producer of assorted treats in the country in the 1960s. These days, the brand is unheard of and only makes baked goods such as bagels, English muffins, bread, and rolls.

Image: Ryan Pouncy

A great name for a brand that provides the strength that a good breakfast should provide, right? Force was one of the first wheat-based cereal brands and it was introduced by the Force Food Company in 1901.

Its mascot was a cartoon character named Sunny Jim, who turned from ill-tempered to happy after eating the cereal. Even though it found success both in the US and in the UK, the brand was discontinued in 2013.

Image: Vinicius Amano

In the early 20th century, Curtiss Candy Company was one of the biggest brands with its name on many iconic treats including Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, and Coconut Grove. Quite the roster, right?

In fact, the candies Baby Ruth and Butterfinger are still around today but sold under a different brand name. Curtiss Candy Company was sold in 1964 and eventually merged with the giant Nabisco brand.

Image: Towfiqu barbhuiya

Sunny Jim was a famous brand of peanut butter founded by a German entrepreneur named Germanus Wilhelm Firnstahl who bought a peanut roaster and factory during The Great Depression.

By the 1950s, its manufacturer Pacific Food Products Co. supplied a third of all the peanut butter in Seattle. However, it was sold in 1979 for $3 million to the Bristol Bay Native Corp.

Image: Gabriel Dalton

While the fate of a product whose name sounds like a terrible disease may have been written on the wall, back in the 1930s, Ayds was quite popular as an appetite-suppressant candy popular in the 1930s. It contained chemicals similar to those used in cough medicine to make people eat less.

It was marketed by movie stars and magazines printed "real life stories" from people who had success with the candy. Its downfall came when it refused to change its name during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Maybe not their best move.

Image: Mateusz Feliksik

Imagine being the first orange fruit concentrate brand at the time when frozen foods were taking off. That's how good Snow Crop had it. Everybody wanted it, and the brand single-handedly increased the popularity of the frozen aisle.

After the orange juice craze, it brought out frozen peas, broccoli, spinach, and strawberries, but was retired sometime in the 1970s.

Image: Dev Benjamin

Frozen dinners have been a staple of American food for quite some time now and Buffalo-based brand Freezer Queen was a big player in the TV dinner market in the 1950s.

Its products included Homestyle Gravy & Meatloaf Slices, Gravy & Sliced Turkey, and Gravy & Salisbury Steak. However, it was unexpectedly dropped after the factory failed a food safety inspection.

Image: Duskfall Crew

Keeping on with the frozen dinner trend, we can’t avoid the brand that created the category. Swanson’s first tray had turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy, and it was reheated in the oven.

Launched in the 1950s, around the time more women were going into the workforce, they were wildly successful. These days they’re sold under the Hungry-Man brand.

Image: Nathan Bingle

Before Cool Whip, there was Lucky Whip. The dessert topping came in a box as well as a spray can and it was a staple in kitchens across the country in the 1960s and 1970s.

You may remember its ads with cute kids putting the whipped topping onto desserts. Sadly, by the 2000s it had all but vanished from the shelves.

Image: Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov

The equivalent of a TV dinner, but in a cup, the curiously-named brand of dehydrated meals from General Mills, Mug-O-Lunch was known for being quick, convenient, and, yes, tasty.

It appeared in the 1970s, the era of all sorts of weird and wonderful convenience foods, and included varieties like macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, and beef noodles. It lasted on shelves a few years before, alas, it was discontinued.