Thursday 3 January 2008

The great vanilla slice hunt continues

Once again, a previously unsampled purveyor of vanilla slice has been tested....and found wanting. This horrible little monster came from Gloria Jeans in Wagga (I think) and the photo shows how little of it I was able to stomach. A vanilla slice normally lasts only seconds in my hands, but this one ended up in the bin.



The poor excuse for passionfruit icing on the top was the first to go. I have found that some slices can be salvaged by peeling off the icing and discarding it and just eating the custard and pastry bits. If the vanilla sliceis half-OK, that's not a bad option.

But this particular slice was bad from top to bottom. It was bad to the bone. It was right up there in the top 5 most inedible vanilla slices that I have eaten. (I reckon I have thrown out only 5 in my entire life, this being the most recent one).

Still, it joins a proud list of other country vanilla slice disasters. I've always had this idea in the back of my mind that because of things like the CWA cookbook, country women are great pastry cooks - baking cakes for country fairs and all that sort of thing.

If that's the case, why have the two most memorably bad vanilla slice experiences been in Wagga and Gundagai?

This has put me in the mood to have a vanilla slice for breakfast. I can't think of anything more disgusting, but it could be just the trick to expunge the taste memory of the wagga experience from my tongue.

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