I'm kinda sorta in love with soft serve ice cream. And I know the middle of icy, frigid February seems an odd time to write this epistle. But right now I'm sitting on a white, sandy beach on Castaway Cay in the Bahamas. And I just finished a banana strawberry twist.
Somehow, soft serve seems less guilty and less decadent than regular ice cream. As if, somehow, being soft means it's also low-cal. "Surely," we all think, "something extruded from a machine must be more akin to yogurt or porridge that actual frozen cream." And this, my friends, is the primrose path to soft-serve induced fat hell.
You get to Castaway Cay in the Bahamas aboard a Disney Cruise ship, which is where we are vacationing right now. We feel really lucky to be here, and if you ever get a chance to go, do it. It's as amazing as you think it would be. Great food, great amenities and the diet coke flows from the tap like water. And there is self-serve soft-serve at every turn. Which inspired me to try and eat my own weight in soft serve every day.
Which is, of course, paradoxical and impossible. You see as you ingest soft serve you immediately get slightly fatter. And so you can't ever eat your actual weight because each bite increases your weight. It's like you're Sisyphus pushing a stone up a sweet, sweet mountain of chocolate and vanilla swirl.
My wife's uncle owns a soft serve ice cream machine (and now that I've made you realize that was a possibility you want one too, right?). He breaks it out occasionally at family parties and BBQs. And when it is there in front of you, you literally want to put soft serve on everything. Put some on a brownie? Sure! In your Diet Coke to make a soft serve float? Absolutely. On your morning waffle? I'll take mine with strawberries. Turkey sandwich? Why not?!?
Yes, hard ice cream is also amazing. It's like soft serves older, cooler brother who's traveled the world and contracted a fudge ripple in Vietnam. But it still feels great to be a kid and swirl that soft twisty goodness onto a cone until it's so high it starts to lean over under the weight of its own deliciousness. And just keep telling yourself it's basically the same thing as yogurt. Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt with flax seeds and kale. And just keep telling yourself that lie as you climb that mountain, Sisyphus.
