The Allure of the Toilet Seat
When sugar calls
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with a pastry I lovingly refer to as a “toilet seat.”
“When you run to Hy-Vee, can you grab us a toilet seat?” I’ll ask my husband, and he’ll give a slight smirk and nod, unable to resist. He’s gotten nearly as addicted as I have. This thing has awakened something within me.
Technically, it’s called a kringle, but that’s a weird word that doesn’t satisfyingly describe the shape it’s baked into. The middle of the delicate, circular dough is filled with almond paste, and the top is sprinkled with almonds and drizzled with a modest amount of frosting. It’s highly reminiscent of the almond patties my family would eat when visiting relatives in northwest Iowa. It’s damn near identical, actually, like someone made a bunch of them line up in a circle. And then there are Dutch letters. I have no idea what the difference between almond patties and Dutch letters is – they have the same ingredients, I think. There are many delivery systems for getting sweet almond paste into your body.
I thought of almond patties as a rare treat from five hours away (somewhat unbelievably, you can drive for five hours straight and still be in the state of Iowa) until my mom randomly brought over a kringle one day last summer. Since then, I’ve probably eaten seven of these things. It’s not super surprising, really. As an adult, I partake in broccoli and tofu and the like, but I have a sweet tooth within me that sometimes gets roused, especially by something that tastes nostalgic.
When my 10-year-old niece and 13-year-old nephew came to visit over Christmas, I was hypocritically aghast at the amount of pop tarts and cookies and doughnuts these kids could put away. To try to get my niece to get a little bit of ground beef – like literally a “grain” of beef – took intense persuading and multiple Air Force One “I don’t negotiate with terrorists” jokes.
“If you want to visit my house, you have to eat that,” I found myself saying to her at one point. I said it with such authority as though I didn’t do unspeakable things to Toaster Strudels when I was her age. I’m guilty of siphoning off frosting meant for the next strudel – the most dickhead move a teenager can make, other than bending all of the spoons in the house by refusing to use an ice cream scoop (I also did that). Devin admitted to a slightly less dickhead but more glutinous move: emptying two frosting packets into the center of two strudels and then eating the whole thing. The ratio was intact, the dignity – maybe not.
When I was a teenager, frosting straight from the jar was my favorite snack, especially if it had those little birthday sprinkles in it, which I embraced year-round. I wasn’t exactly baking up a storm at 14, but I inexplicably had an open jar of frosting in the fridge at all times. I stuck up my nose at my nephew eating pop tarts instead of my legendary scrambled eggs (they're really good, unlike most of my cooking!), but when I was his age, I so efficiently consumed sugar that I rejected the unfrosted edges of pop tarts and left them uneaten on my plate like bread crusts.
When I’m tearing apart a toilet seat, it’s possible I shouldn’t judge my little relatives for their eating habits. They aren’t ideal, but maybe we all have to go through an intense love affair with sugar to eventually discover that asparagus exists. Maybe the childhood drive to find sugar is too strong to hope to completely control it. I remember maybe a dozen specific memories from the friend’s house where I spent most summer days, but spin me around, drop me in the kitchen, and I could still tell you exactly where they kept the Zebra Cakes.
My childhood taste for pop tarts eventually faded, leaving only a trace of what it once was. I have standards now. No Toaster Strudel frosting packets, no pop tarts, very rarely Little Debbie anything. I don’t even desire to keep that stuff in the house. But when you put something with sweet almond filling in front of me, I’m definitely going to have some. No matter what shape it comes in.
