Miss me? No? Maybe you forgot who this is. I am your chocolate chaperone, your deputy of desserts! Buckle up, proverbial “buckaroos,” as we head back into the dark recesses of my mind once again.

Breakfast Desserts

• Blueberry Scones: Juicy and sweet blueberries were practically designed to be put inside the flaky, dry husk of a scone. Perfect with tea, this dessert—if it even counts—is just the right amount of sweetness. Still, as discussed prior, ratios aren’t everything, and the flavor is a bit too subtle on this one. 6/10
• Lemon Scones: The perfect way to add some zest to your morning routine without feeling like your breakfast is too unhealthy. The light, subtle flavor of lemon adds to the scone base to a great extent, but it’s still a scone. 6/10
• Raspberry Scones: Not as good as its counterparts, the raspberry scone leaves an element of sweetness to be desired. 5/10
• Chocolate Chip Muffins: This is another very effective use of chocolate in a dessert without it being overbearing. However, I am a firm believer that the muffin would be sufficiently sweet without the sugar on top, so that detracts from the overall quality a bit. 6/10
• Blueberry Muffins: What can be said about the blueberry muffin that hasn’t already been said? It’s a breakfast staple, and another great use of the fruit. 7/10
• Lemon poppy seed Muffins: Lemon poppy seed is my pick for the most underrated flavor for desserts. Anyone who has yet to try a lemon poppy seed cookie (or muffin for that matter) is doing themselves a disservice. Still, as is a trend at this school, the quality of the dessert in concept is not necessarily reflected by the actual product we are presented with. A mediocre LPM (what we fans call lemon poppy seed muffins) is an LPM nonetheless. 7/10
• Danishes

We have much to thank Denmark for: Lego, Handball, Bluetooth and a whole host of other things. The danish, however, is not something I thank them for. These overrated desserts are uninspired uses of puff pastry that lack any originality or uniqueness.

• Cheese: Who puts cheese in a dessert? Despite its odd taste, the inclusion of such an odd ingredient does give the dish some semblance of originality. 4/10
• Raspberry: A good tasting dish, this treat fails to compel the consumer. I don’t not like danishes, but I never find myself choosing them over anything else. 4/10
• Apple Cinnamon: This is really your only option for an apple-cinnamon-flavored dessert at breakfast, and for that, this one is actually pretty good. 5/10
• Cinnamon rolls: These are perhaps the worst sufferers of the quality dropoff one experiences here. The differential between a good cinnamon roll and the ones in the dining hall is astronomically large. Based on the intrinsic goodness of the roll, with its near-perfect ratio of sweet to cinnamon to bread, the dining hall offerings are still pretty good. 7/10

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Dessert is the most important part of a meal. Look, I’m no STEM major, but even I can tell that this has been a pretty important section if ever there was one.

Pies

Allow me to put a caveat here before I discuss pies: I love pie. For the past five years, I have had a birthday pie on my birthday instead of a cake. I have gone so far as to have a co-worker’s nana make me a pie for my birthday. That being said, I will attempt to rate these as objectively as possible.

• Miniature pies
  • Apple: Everything that makes an apple pie great is amplified by its conversion into miniature form. Sometimes the least enjoyable parts of an apple pie are the sections where there is too much filling and not enough crust. Yes, I know the filling is delicious, but if you just want to eat the filling, you’re better off with a compote. A perfect dessert in my book. 9/10
  • Blueberry: Blueberry pie suffers even more than apple pie from a bad filling-to-crust ratio, due to the richness and moisture of the filling. This miniature blueberry pie, while sometimes hard to eat cleanly, is worth the potential stains. 8/10
• Pies
  • Apple: Apple pie is my favorite pie, plain and simple. The campus version has a good balance of apple to cinnamon, and the crust is always sufficiently flaky. Although the dining hall version isn’t anything special, even mediocre apple pie is one of the best desserts. 8/10
  • Strawberry: Strawberry filling is too sweet to make an adequate pie filling. Oftentimes pies are filled with a combination of sweet strawberries and tart rhubarb and these strawberry-only pies show off why that is a much better idea. 5/10
  • Cherry: Cherry pie is incredibly similar to blueberry pie in both texture and level of sweetness. This one comes down to a simple preference between the two fruits. I prefer blueberries, so I rate cherry pies lower, but just know that the two ratings are easily interchangeable. 7/10
  • Key lime: Easily the worst dessert the dining hall offers, the key lime pie is the only one I have ever not been able to and not wanted to finish. Know that on a list of desserts, even a 2/10 is generally still going to taste good (such is the nature of desserts). I cannot overstate how bad this pie is. Even if you are a lover of key lime, I cannot in good faith recommend this one to you. 1/10 (I would give it 0/10 if I could, but I am contractually obligated to use whole numbers.)

Anyways, in conclusion pie is pretty great, I guess.

Miscellaneous desserts

• Chocolate truffle (potentially lava cake when in microwave)
  • Plain: While it has recently come to my attention that these truffles can be heated up to resemble lava cake, I will be judging them, like all other desserts on this list, as they are presented to me in the dining hall. That being said, these are much too decadent and exemplify all of the potential shortcomings of chocolate desserts. These are a struggle to finish by yourself due to their unwieldy size. Maybe these would be manageable if you had friends or a significant other, but I wouldn’t know. 2/10
  • Vanilla frosting dollop: The addition of vanilla frosting does help cut the richness but only marginally so. 3/10
  • Vanilla frosting dollop with raspberry drizzle: The raspberry drizzle has even less of an impact than the vanilla frosting, but it still helps. 3/10
• Whoopie pie: Whoopie pies take what makes an oreo so good and improves on it somehow. The ratio of chocolate to vanilla is so perfect in this dessert that it is unrivaled in this department. Even so, despite the intrinsic qualities of the dessert, the ones provided on campus are mediocre representations. A bad whoopie pie is still a whoopie pie nonetheless. 6/10
• Peach cobbler: Great with ice cream or plain, these rarely offered desserts provide a good balance between crust and fruit filling. I wish the peaches were cut or mashed into smaller pieces rather than being whole slices, but the flavor is still pretty great on these. 7/10
• Carrot cake: Yet another rare dessert, the carrot cake is one of the dining halls’ hidden gems. A good take on a classic dessert earns a spot amongst the best desserts on campus. 8/10

These were the desserts that just didn’t fit in… Not fitting in, What’s that like? I have no idea! (he says while writing the conclusion to his ranking of the desserts for his college newspaper)