Cruisin' For Dessert

Wow, what they say about cruise ships and the amount of food on offer is not an exaggeration.  If you've never been on a cruise before, it's hard to imagine having food on offer almost all of the time.  It's not just available in one place either; cruises give you options and offer food at several places all the time.  Sure on off hours (like midnight) they may only offer you one buffet, but during peak hours on a cruise you may have a multitude of places you can stuff you face.  It's also almost guaranteed that at least one of the places on offer is a buffet.

So what does that have to do with candy fanatics?  These meals aren't just snacks, these are full meals, and full meals always include dessert.  I'm told that a sign of a good cruise is that there are a wide variety of foods, and since dessert is the most important part of any meal for me, a variety of desserts peaks my interest.  I just returned from a cruise, and I was lucky enough to sample a few desserts:

Sugar free strawberry shortcake
Vanilla custard with poached orange
Sugar free cake roll
Chocolate dome ball
Dueto chocolate mousse in philo and a chocolate custard cake
Chocolate soufflé
Chocolate brownie
Berry flan
Praline cake
Lemon Meringue pie
Vanilla custard with apricot

Now this may not seem like a lot, but keep in mind that the cruise was only 6 days, and I had a few meals off the boat.

For this cruise the desserts were handled very well, most importantly they were small.  While being small, you could pretty much take as many of them as you wanted.  So if you wanted to try more than one sweet treat, that was fine.  If you wanted to have a whole lot of one particular dessert, that was also fine.  The quality of the desserts did vary, but on the whole they were all pretty good.

When you think about quality, you also have to imagine the quantity that was on offer.  Not once did I have to choose another dessert because they were out, and seconds, and even thirds, was always an option.  So this cruise of almost 2000 guests was making some pretty large quantities of dessert.  Because of this, some desserts seemed to work better than others.  I found that the custard and cream desserts did the best.  They would sit well in the cold, and they had a bit of a shelf life.  Cakes were hit and miss, sometimes dry, but other times nice and moist.  I imagine that's because of when I ate them compared to when they were baked.

The absolute highlight and lowest points were a bit of a surprise for me.  There was a tie for the best between the vanilla custard with poached orange, and sugar free (yes sugar free) strawberry short cake.  I'm not sure if it was a coincidence that those two desserts came out on the first night.  The big surprise was that the shortcake was sugar free, it didn't taste it at all.  The other surprise was how much I loved the slight orange flavour in the custard.  The low point was the praline cake, dry and fairly uninspired.  I also wasn't a big fan of the mousse filled with philo cup, it was so hard to eat and not enough mousse.

None of the desserts would ever go down as being the best I've ever tried, but all were tasty.  I can't imagine making so many desserts for so many people every day.  You would also have to keep in mind that these desserts would often sit out on a cool table for hours at a time.  I'm sure that some cruises deal with food better than others, but it appears that always having food is an important part of any boat trip.  Have you been on a cruise, what were the sweet treats like?

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