When I planned my trip to La Jolla and San Diego in October, I started by researching things to do (the zoo!), places to eat, and then houses, flights, and cars. I like to make sure I have at least one great dinner when I’m on a vacation, and, because I run this site, I also like to make sure my list includes at least one good bakery. I was in luck because a quick perusal of Trip Advisor showed an eatery called Extraordinary Desserts on the first page for San Diego restaurants. Sold! Say no more. When I asked for recommendations on Good Taste Photography’s Facebook page, Extraordinary Desserts came up again in several comments, so it was 100% certain I’d have to set foot in this establishment.

On Saturday evening, I went to the location by Balboa Park because I had just spent my day there. We planned to get dessert, keep it in the car, then go to the Gaslamp district to get dinner. I found parking right outside the restaurant and was surprised to see a great many tables outside and in, lit with candles and possessed of a bistro-like ambiance. I had expected a bakery or cupcake atmosphere with limited seating and a lot of take-out, but Extraordinary Desserts was in fact a cafe that only sold dessert.

They had waiters. Wow.

We stepped in line, which was already edging out the door despite it being pre-dinner at 6 PM or so. I knew what I was getting into, but the man in front of me did not. He stepped back into line with his female companion after perusing the selection ahead and said, “$10 for a creme brulee? No way.”

She just looked at him. It was The Look. This particular one was particularly withering to the male species, because, in that moment, what I felt radiating from her was an aura of “So you’re cheap?”. She said nothing, and he tried again, realizing his mistake. “The line is really long, and I don’t like anything here.”

Another moment passed. She finally said, “So you want to leave?”

“Yeah, let’s go somewhere else.”

“Fine.” Mama wasn’t happy.

$10 for a dessert is a lot. They were all pricy, except for my favorite one – the raspberry tart, which was only $3.50. However, if you’re already there, and you’re surrounded by people eager to eat these $10 items.. I don’t know. I’d stay. (That said, I was in Delicious Orchards recently, and I found some sea salt caramels, which I am always on the lookout for. I was positively going to buy them until I flipped over the box and saw it was $12 for 5-6 caramels. For sugar, cream, and salt! I can understand the man’s outrage.)

But back to Extraordinary Desserts, they left, and we stayed, passing by a display of teas and coffee until we were firmly in Dessert Land. There were about 10 desserts in the case with another refrigerated case under the cash register filled with cakes and parfaits. I picked 3 things somewhat at random: the chocolate pecan tart, because I don’t see that very often, the chocolate streusel cake, because it looked good and Lou likes denser cakes, and the raspberry danish, because chocolate never photographs well. (Yes, I’m always thinking of that.)

Chocolate pecan tart from Extraordinary Desserts

Disclaimer: the lighting in my La Jolla home was not very good. It consisted almost entirely of track lights on dimmers. There were no lamps. The house was a 1930 historic building, so I think its age, plus the fact California should be sunny all the time, made them scale back on such things. As a result, it was extremely challenging to photo anything in this house without flash. I lit candles, I turned lights on, I used my fastest lens, but I was still deeply unsatisfied with the photos.

However, the use of candles led me to this photo, which is very traditionally styled in a way I would normally never do. A glass table, a wine glass, a candle. It was like a Valentine’s Day shoot!

Chocolate pecan tart

Onto the tart. It was the size of a cd and two inches tall, so it was definitely meant to be shared. It was dense, too, packed with nuts and goo. You can see the lattice-work of the crust on top, with pecans peaking out. It was like a pie on the top but a cake on the bottom. The crust was hard, dense like a brownie, and almost like a chocolate-chocolate cookie in taste and texture.

Pecan tart topped with flowers, chocolate, pecans, and gold-leaf

Every single item that Karen sells in Extraordinary Desserts has fresh flowers and gold leaf on it, as far as I could tell. These were rose petals, set in a dollop of chocolate ganache, topped with a toasted pecan that had edible gold leaf laid on it. Rose petals are edible but I just didn’t feel like it. I did  eat some of that pecan but I’m not wild about eating gold, either.

Honestly, I am just not a fan of this look, period. It just seems needlessly gauche, and the application seems sloppy. It screams of a checklist in the back that says. “1. Add chocolate. 2. Add flowers. 3. Apply gold leaf.” They’re just adding the requisite items, not thinking of whether it makes sense or pleases the eye. If half the pecan, vertically or horizontally, was covered in gold foil, or there seemed to be some sort of rhyme or reason to its appearance, I’d be down with it. As it is, this just looks a little pretentious.

Slice of the tart

But how did it taste? Golly, it is it dense. You can see the nutty texture in this photo – chocolate and broken nuts mixed with the gooey mixture of brown sugar, molasses, and bourbon that makes up the base of a pecan pie. It was too much for me, personally. Two bites, and I was so overwhelmed with the richness that I was done. That’s probably great for my diet but a little disappointing for my palate, because I’d like to linger over a dessert, enjoying it for several minutes. If you love pecan pie, and you love chocolate, and you think pie+cake sounds amazing, go for this.

Japanese Kit Kat pile!

I recently heard of green tea and chestnut Kit Kats in Japan. I love to eat weird things, especially Japanese ones, and especially green tea flavors, so this was extremely exciting news. Since I was going to San Diego, and I remembered there being a Japanese community there, I told myself I’d stop at a certain shop and pick some up. I didn’t have to go that far, though, because I found a plethora of Japanese candy in Panninkin’s, a coffee and tea importer in the Gaslamp district. I bought almost every type of Kit Kat they had, in addition to some other Japanese chocolates because I just have no self control.

I actually didn’t know what I was buying when I bought it. Some of the Kit Kats had English or French on them, but most just had little icons or color cues. (I’d show you a photo of their full Kit Kat display, but they told me I couldn’t take photos of it.. after I bought over $20 of candy and two coffees from them. Come on, guys. That’s lame.)

Domu-kun eats my kit kats

That’s my Domu-kun cup! I got him at 7-11 when they did a promo. It seems really fitting to put Japanese Kit Kats in him. You may know him from the ‘Everytime you do (x), God kills a Kitten’ photos.

Domu-kun!

He is actually the mascot for a Japanese TV station, where he got some commercials.. and then he got his own manga, and his own video games, and internet fame. The 7-11 version portrayed him as ravenously eating everything in the store. In this image, it looks like he is trying to eat the ‘semisweet’ Kit Kat box.

Japanese Kit Kats in a cup

What do we have here? The collection includes white chocolate and semi-sweet, which seem normal enough. There’s also raspberry and cookie-flavored. Still not impressed? How about bitter almond? (Cyanide flavored??) Mixed Juice? Pudding? Blueberry? They’re all here. 

The golden Bitter Almond wrapper on the bottom reminds me of a Twix.

The yellow one in the middle is the Mixed Juice. I had originally seen the shapes as leaves and turkeys, so I hoped that one might be the Chestnut flavor when I bought it. Then I ate it, and it tasted like bananas. It turns out the images were fruit. Oops.

Have a break, have a kit kat.

I don’t remember Kit Kats in America coming in boxes. These all contain two sleeves of two Kit Kats each, for four total. They really go all-out in making the boxes look different. There’s a flavor called Royal Milk  Tea that even uses a British Burberry-like pattern on it. I, alas, did not get to try that one. In fact, even though my loot had a lot of flavors I’ve never seen in America, I missed the ones that were truly Japanese, like miso soup, soy, green tea, and sakura (cherry blossom). I also missed the ones that were truly weird, like corn, sweet potato, roasted tea, beets, and ginger ale. Yes, you can get all that in a Kit Kat. Here’s a comprehensive list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat.

Framboise/Raspberry Japanese Kit Kat

Here is the pink interior of the “Framboise” or raspberry. This was probably my favorite. I love the tart flavor of raspberry jelly, and it worked well with the wafer here.

Cookie Plus Japanese Kit Kat

This is the “Cookie Plus” flavor. You can see the extra dense layer on top — that’s where the cookie is. There also seems to be a greenish layer on the bottom.

Cookie Plus Japanese Kit Kat

That leads me to a funny story about Cookie Plus. Like I said, I didn’t know what kind of Kit Kats I had purchased. I spent a lot of time on the internet, looking at photos of other people’s Kit Kats and hoping they had captioned them. This worked for every case except one – Cookie Plus. Since I was desperate, and I’m not entirely unfamiliar with Japanese (I speak some and have been studying the culture since I was 10), I decided to try to translate it myself. There are three written languages in Japan – kanji, which has many, many elaborate symbols, hiragana, which is used for certain words in which the kanji is too difficult or doesn’t exist, or to augment kanji, and katakana, which is used for foreign words. Then, add in romaji, which is when they use roman letters (abc) to write Japanese sounds.

So, I assumed that the name of a Kit Kat flavor would be hiragana or katakana, because the letters didn’t look like kanji and it might be a foreign word. I eventually got ‘washiki purasu’ off the label. As soon as I saw purasu, I was excited, because that was probably ‘Plus’, so it seemed like I was using the write language. Unfortunately, washiki means a Japanese-style toilet. So, this was a “Toilet Plus!” flavored Kit Kat? I mean, it did have a, um, green layer at the bottom, and there were some whacky flavors, but that just seemed impossible. Plus I had already eaten some, so I had a vested interest.

After some more research, I stumbled upon a flavor called Cookie Plus. Alright! Now THAT seemed reasonable. But.. what’s the word for cookie? It’s kuuki. It turns out that the first part of the label used the kanji for cookie, which surprised me for a lot of reasons that I won’t go into here. Well, better than Toilet Plus!

White chocolate Japanese kit kats

These were just white chocolate Kit Kats. You can buy them in America, and they weren’t so exciting. I also tried a pudding flavor, which was good – it tasted like vanilla pudding with a touch of something else like cinnamon or caramel. That was my second favorite. No one died from eating Bitter Almond, either. Mixed Juice tasted like a banana milkshake, so I wasn’t a fan. I don’t remember how strawberry cheesecake tasted, because I ate it weeks ago. Blueberry, alas, is still uneaten, and someone is getting it for Gift Day.

Next on my list.. green tea, sakura, and a wine Kit Kat, if I can score it. Definitely try some if you can!

Japanese kit kats with labels

This last photo is for any desperate Googlers trying to figure out what Kit Kat they have in their hand.

I went to Portland last year and visited a friend. Before leaving, I had jokingly asked him and his wife if they wanted me to bring anything from New York City. I was thinking a Black and White cookie would be awesome but none of New York’s quintessential edible stuff would make the trip to Portland. When I actually got there, I felt like I still wanted to find something unusual to give them, and I saw Moonstruck Chocolates in a shop’s window.

I had never seen such adorable chocolates before. They had a wide assortment of animals as well as exotic truffles and other shapes. I ended up buying my friend some, myself some, and my mother some. I think I spent $80 on chocolate that day.

I took some photos in the hotel room as I ate my assortment, which included a chocolate turtle, a lemon-flavored clownfish, a a dark chocolate sheep, an adorable white kitty, an oyster with a pearl in it, and a cognac truffle topped with gold powder and an almond ‘crown’. This is not a great shot but it gives a clear view of all the chocolates, which were really gorgeous. Look at the fin on the fish and his stripes. The rounded tail on the cat. The swirls of color on the chocolate shell. The curly fluff on the sheep. Wonderful craftsmanship. Here is a video of how they make the clownfish.

Circle of chocolates

I’m much fonder of this shot. Here is the kitty peaking out of his chocolate box. Yes, he has a heart-shaped nose. I love Moonstruck’s attention to detail.

Chocolate kitty in a box of chocolates

This next photo may look familiar to you, as I recently did a short Portland post that featured this coffee art. The chocolate kitty was in the background, exploring the table, in that picture. This is another favorite of mine, because balancing on the edge of a coffee cup seems like such a cat-like thing to do. He is just perched there, bundled like he might take a nap.

Kitty on a coffee cup

I forget if this turtle’s shell tasted minty. I do recall the lemon clownfish was delightfully lemony, though! Alas, I was unimpressed by the gold truffle and the oyster in a pearl. It was beautiful, but the chocolate oyster had a weird, crackly texture that was realistic but not enjoyable. The gold-topped truffle was nothing exciting, I’m sorry to say.

Chocolate turtle

Despite not loving every piece of chocolate, I often give Moonstruck Chocolate as gifts because they’re just so unique (though pricey). This brings us to.. the giveaway!

Caramel truffles from Moonstruck Chocolate

These are truffles with liquid caramel centers, including pear, 3-caramel, coffee, and chile-flavors. I haven’t tried them yet but they look awesome, so I am giving a box away. All you have to do is leave a comment about your favorite chocolate memory.

I made some chocolate for Easter, and seashells were the most spring-like mold I had, along with palm trees. I ended up making these, some chocolate-dipped oreos, and ganache-filled chocolate cups. The ganache cups were delicious, but not good photography subjects. The shells fared better. They are white chocolate marbled with food coloring gel. I think I flavored them with anise extract to mess with people’s heads.

They look huge here, but they were closer to the size of the a quarter. This green shell didn’t marble well. Marbling in chocolate is actually very difficult because the chocolate is so thick that vibrant colors are difficult to make to begin with, and when you add them to another color, they just mix together in a blob, rather than having distinct swirls.

Conch shell in green chocolate

I like the mysterious shimmer on this chocolate. The marbling is somewhat apparent here.

Gold marbled chocolate seashell

The marbling was highly successful on these chocolates. Their edges were rough so they looked messy in a single focus shot. I picked this ensemble photo instead, then drew on it to make up for its lack of artistic merit.

I didn't photograph them this way on purpose.