sap drip

The 100%-proven way to improve the taste (read ‘desirability’) of sweets or baked goods is to bring them to the office. It could be a cake that flopped or the candy canes from Christmas you still have at Easter. It doesn’t even matter if your co-workers can identify the food, which has often been the case when a colleague brought back “something” from Asia or the Middle East. Did anyone know what it was? Did anyone actually like the taste? No, but there it was (like the mountain) so they ate it.

I, for example, could never stand those maple syrup candies from Canada, the ones that look like brown sugar granules fused together with corn syrup into the shape of a maple leaf. But when a colleague brought some to the office, what did I have after lunch? In fact, I hoarded two extra in my drawer in case the world ended.

Last October I brought back those tri-color Halloween candy corn from America that everyone professed to hate but which quickly vanished. I hate them, too, but confined to the office, I eat them in a busy three-part nibbling process of tip, middle and bottom.

Even worse, my husband has a student who often gives him bars of dark chocolate with hazelnuts that everyone in my family, including me, would rather die than eat. One day I got the bright idea to bring them to the office, where they were magically transformed the moment I got through the door into my personal booty. I didn’t put them on the table to share; I just put them in my drawer where I began the gradual but successful project of devouring them with a horrible, twisted look of disgust on my face.