I realize this is old all hell, but I don't care. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's an old post by Tycho (also known as Jerry Holkins) of Penny Arcade fame. So, I bring you, Carrot Cake Soup.

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I noted just after the holiday that I'd amassed a certain affection for the culinary arts, that is to say, the construction of the edible. My sister (who has given up being a lesbian altogether, instead seeking new ways to fit more people on a single bed) is a professional in the field, which probably started me on this dark path - but Asheron's Call clearly pushed me over the edge. Add a couple chef templates - both Iron and Naked - I heard the call, and my very blood answered. Overall, it's a hobby well suited to geekery - emphasis on experimentation, solo activity, and consumption. Sign me the fuck up.

Long story short, I'm getting my chicken soup on, it's Sunday afternoon, and Gabe's reading some Preacher in the Den, which is also the living room, the bathroom, and the foyer. I am interacting with pasta dough in what I think is a stern way, when I hear him say that he might like the soup better if it were, in fact, carrot cake. It hits us, hits us both, simultaneously, like a semi made out of lightning which is also a professional boxer. Carrot Cake Soup. You cube the carrot cake, some pieces have frosting and some don't, and you put a handful of these chunks into a bowl full of milk. So let's go do it. We'll do it later this week, he says. But I know that's the same as not doing it. Why not now, I say? I know a store where we can get all the stuff. You can just buy it, the way you can buy stuff in the household cleaners section and make a bomb big enough to kill God. The stuff is just lying around there and nobody's doing anything with it. It's not a crime to buy them separately, and what we do at home isn't any of their fucking business.

I think someone might have been following us as we pulled into the parking lot, we walked toward the grocery store and tried to keep the conversation natural. We certainly didn't discuss carrot cake or the soup one might make but cutting it into cubes and swimming islands of it in cold milk, pleasure islands, like you'd see in a magazine. At the bakery counter, a woman asks if she can help me, and I'm so nervous that as I'm pointing to the carrot cake behind the glass, my finger starts to tap in Morse Code that reads:

I AM ABOUT TO COMMIT A CRIME AGAINST GOD AND MAN STOP

And where is Gabe with that Goddamn milk? There he is, in the self-checkout. Idiot. There's cameras all over that thing, it's like a Goddamn surveillance tree. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. A red light flashes on, and off in my mind. At another checkstand, I pay with untraceable cash, assuring the woman that I will eat the cake by myself, without assistance from cows. I smirk. This woman has no idea that she's just sold me the trigger to a flavor gun.

Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out. It has an extraordinary power that oscillates between gentle and overwhelming, between light and dark, between pleasure and more pleasure. When it was over, I realized that I was panting. I was in possession of carnal knowledge. And I knew that, somehow, every taste beyond this point was in the service of the one that still lingered, waited, to remind me that nature has laws, and those that break them are criminals, and though they roam free enough the knowing will hold them, and keep them, until the last.
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Yeah, it's funny, but I also think it's very well-written. Whatever.