>The Verdict

>After months of planning, hours of labor and scores of anxiety-ridden sleepless nights, I placed my double-chocolate-glazed-coconut-almond-cake-with-white-chocolate-filling on the table yesterday evening, ready to face off against the best of the best in my own Christmas dessert cage match… er… party. Here’s my contribution:

Pretty? Yes. Tasty? Well… The added layer made it look better, but it also made for a dryer cake. Good, but not my best. Damn!

Luckily, it was good enough to pass muster among the other desserts- the homemade pumpkin pie, the boubon-laced truffles, the family-secret cranberry crisp, the cookies and tiramisus and petit fours. We had two tables filled with every kind of sweet imaginable.

And there were a few standouts among them… This mint chocolate cake was delicious.

There also was a batch of apple crisp cookies that looked ordinary, but tasted spectacular. And there were long pretzel sticks hand-dipped in white chocolate that were surprisingly good.

In fact, I would have been having a great time tasting the desserts my friends had made, were it not for Anne McDougal, the Dame of Desserts, guaranteed to be making her fashionably late appearance at any moment, smiling modestly as the pie-bearing peasants made way for Her Gourmetness and carrying before her a tray of something-or-other that looked divine and tasted like the Holidays in Heaven.

As I took another bite of my cake, the truth was undeniable. This year, she was bound to win. My cake just wasn’t good enough to compete with an Anne McDougal Concoction. Fuck! I was going to be outdone again.

I waited anxiously as the minutes passed. 7:30. 8:00. 8:30. Perhaps she had another party before ours. 9:00. 9:30.

She wasn’t coming. She wasn’t coming and she didn’t even call with an explanation.

The guests began murmuring among themselves. Where were the McDougals? Didn’t Anne make a great dessert for the party every year? One guest said that Jim McDougal had called him the day he received his invitation, to ask what he was bringing. Another had talked to Jim just yesterday about the party. Clearly, they had planned on making an appearance.

There was only one explanation.

Something had gone horribly wrong in Anne McDougal’s kitchen. I tried not to snicker as I imagined the possibilities. A caved-in souffle, perhaps? A burned bananas foster? If their child was sick, they would’ve called. If their car had broken down, they would’ve called.

On the other hand, if Anne’s dessert had gone belly-up, there was no way their pride would let them admit to it over the phone. I could just picture Jim in a tie and sportcoat, sighing on the stairs while Anne perched on a stool in the kitchen pantry, sobbing into the crumpled lap of her apron.

Back at my house, the rest of the party was a hoot. My confidence buoyed by more than a few sips of wine, I regaled some my guests with an embellished tale of Anne’s two-day-marinade-a-thon for our dessert party the year before.

“And I was all, ‘Bitch, what’d I do to you?” I told my friends, laughing. Oh, life was good. This year at least, I was the hostess with the mostess.

Yet today, Anne’s unexplained absence has nagged at me a little bit, along with the usual headache and dehydration.

Because I thought of another reason why Anne might not have shown up last night.

Maybe she reads this blog.