Whenever we go to Swensen's for ice-cream, the wife will invariably order her Coit Tower sans strawberry and hot fudge sauce toppings. I always assumed that she didn't like strawberry and hot fudge toppings. Today, she ordered the same thing, but the order got garbled in the kitchen. Both our sundaes arrived sans strawberry and hot fudge toppings. Small error, so I let it go. As I dug in, I realized what the wife had known for the last couple of decades of being married to me: ice-cream sundaes taste so much better without the intrusion of oversweet flavoured sauce toppings that are only added on as eye-candy, but overwhelm the subtler and more varied flavours of the ice-cream underneath. The brightness of plain vanilla blending with rich chocolate awoke in my mouth, and now I know what I've been missing all this time we've been going to our favourite San Francisco-themed dessert joint. From now on, it's going to be naked sundaes. Less is truly more.
