food memory

Okay, I promise, scrimshaw pics tomorrow! The Corsair is looking really good and I'm working on the background sky at this point, I simply have not photographed it...

Anyway that's not what I'm going to talk about tonight.

As someone who REALLY likes to bake, sometimes I get an idea in mind and I will totally obsess about it until I actually create it. Hmm, actually I do this with art too.

Up until the age of about 3 years old, I lived in San Diego, CA. After that, I have visited there at least once a year. So I'm not sure if this memory comes from when I was 3, or when I was slightly older, but I suspect it's from when I lived there. From time to time, the family would go out to dinner at a restaurant called Anthony's. My brother says there was a pond there. I don't remember the pond. Or the decor, or the dinner, though I know it was seafood. I remember the cake. It was the highlight of my little three-year-old existence. It was like a bite of pure bliss, it was the only thing there that any of us kids really wanted to eat, it was amazing.

I have no idea what it tasted like, I couldn't describe it, I don't remember it and don't know if I would recognize it, I just remember being crazy about it. It was zabaglione cake, or zabaione, I'm not sure what spelling they used. Sponge cake with a rum custard sauce, apparently. I have scoured the internet for THEIR recipe, can't find it, but did unearth something that said they dropped it from the menu a few years ago, which is extremely tragic, and also means that I will never again experience it.

Yet I am determined to re-create it. That's hard, having nothing to compare it to. If anyone out there in blog-land ever ate the cake at Anthony's, and has any idea if there is a recipe out there, do tell. Because I'm going to obsess about it until I figure out how to make it.