I was out to dinner with my wife recently and we had just eaten a light meal. We decided to indulge ourselves with dessert. Being food lovers, we are always interested in new delicious food experiences, so we chose a cake from the dessert cabinet  we had never seen before ??? A Chocolate Diana cake. Designed to be the mother of all desserts, this cake had a chocolate sponge base, a layer of chocolate mousse, a layer of cheesecake, a layer of vanilla sponge, and was topped with chocolate icing, a chocolate stick, and a blob of vanilla icing, served with cream and ice cream with a strip of chocolate sauce and caramel sauce beside it. WOW!  The cake was an uncut virgin so we knew our serve would be fresh.

With great anticipation, I mindfully tuned into my first mouthful. The texture was certainly moist and fresh, but the flavours were so bland that I could not distinguish between the cheese cake layer and the mousse layer. It just tasted like a soft, moist mouthful of choclatey stuff. But it looked so good! Surely I was mistaken? So my next mouthful included some of the caramel and chocolate sauce …. now it tasted like choclatey stuff with commercial supersweet, bottled ice-cream topping! Even the chocolate stick on top had no flavour and was obviously made from cheap compound chocolate. I had had enough. If you are going to enjoy yourself, it has to be worth the calories. My wife agreed that this cake was definitely not worth it, so we were comfortable with abandoning the mission at this point ??? leaving half the serve behind.

My wife observed that what she was most pleased about as we left the restaurant, was that her mind was happily commenting tha she had ???saved calories???. In the past, her mind would have been berating her for ???wasting food???. By repeatedly leaving a little food on her plate over the last few years (especially when noticing she was no longer hungry, or the food was not tasty) she had finally retrained her brain to undo those childhood scripts of eating everything on her plate. So now the customary guilt was being replaced by self-congratulation – way cool!