The Wallflower Report

Okay so it’s been almost a month since I’ve posted but I’ve got a pretty good reason in that I temporarily forgot where the internet was. I thought maybe it existed in the hearts of every child everywhere, but it turns out it’s actually inside computers, which means I wasted a lot of time studying the diagrams in medical text books.

In the mean time not a whole lot of stuff has happened but just recently I went on a road trip with Judy and some friends to Des Moines.

Des Moines is the capital of Iowa and it is a very historical city. It was originally settled by grabby French settlers, as you can tell from its name, which translates into English as “These? MINE!”

Des Moines was historically a very important center of trade which is why today there are like a dozen shopping malls there, and we visited all of them.

The first thing you want to do when you go into a mall is locate the Hot Topic. You don’t actually want to go in. You just want to make sure it’s there. Hot Topic is nature’s way of telling you that you’re actually in a mall and not, say, an airport. That can be tricky, since they both have food courts.

Not all the malls in Des Moines actually have Hot Topics, apparently, but if you can’t find one, you should look for a Cinnabon or Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. This can get tricky, since you’d expect food vendors to be attached to the food court, but that’s not always the case. Though I guess some airports have Cinnabon in them. Maybe if you can’t find a Hot Topic, you should just hedge your bets and assume you’re in an airport.

Anyway, the very best mall in Des Moines is the Valley West Mall. It is an authentic mall, with an authentic Hot Topic, but the reason it is the best mall has to do with a store called Chocolaterie Stam, which is Dutch for French for “Stan’s Choco-Lottery.” The Choco-Lottery is what you will feel like you’ve won after you’ve eaten just one of their chocolate bon-bons (which is either French for “Good bon!” or maybe “Bon good!”… I can never remember.)

They are made in all sorts of clever shapes to reflect the sort of filling they have, like chocolate maple leaves with maple-flavored filling or chocolate orange and lemon slices with fruit-flavored filling, or chocolate with an “Ess” stamped on it for “strawberry” or dark chocolate hedgehogs filled with whipped cream, to symbolize how hedgehogs are made of dark chocolate and filled with whipped cream.

At $1.50 each or only slightly cheaper by the pound, they are not very cheap. This is why if you ever visit the Choco-Lottery I recommend that you pick out just five or six dozen of your particular favorites and use somebody else’s credit card.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.