The blissful marriage of fat, sugar, and salt

A week or so ago, during one of my senseless dessert blog crawls, I came across this beguiling creation. For those of you who are link shy and don't want to be deprived of Astorian Dream commentary for even a moment, I can summarize it for you: it's the most delicious looking dessert creation and also a really well presented blog. So enraptured am I by what is so far the only post I have seen on it, that I became the 747th follower of the blog (an honor I usually only bestow on people who require you to follow them to enter some contest for a free silicon muffin pan or something or, you know, people I actually know). Let me break it down further for you. This dessert is inspired by the pretzel m&m, a treat that despite my predilection for all things sweet and salty, I have never tried. I chalk that up to the fact I almost never buy candy and because I found the ad campaign somewhat unsettling. I'm all about anthropomorphizing food, but does it have to be so surgical?

At any rate, I digress. Let's revenons à nos moutons. Or rather revenons à nos sugar cravings. To break this down, does this dessert have a layer of chocolate mousse decorated with pretzel m&ms? It does. Does it also have a rich cheesecake layer at its core? Again, yes. Finally, is the creation stabilized by a delicious pretzel-based crust? It couldn't be any other way. For all of the above reasons, I knew I had to make this. However, I am not such a glutton that I would consider making it without an occasion, knowing that I would be forced to consume at least half of it myself. So quickly, I began searching for an occasion. Granted, I could always just invite people over to my apartment, but then they would probably expect food other than just cheesecake. As luck would have it, a good friend had just moved to a new place and another friend a couple of blocks away had just re-decorated her apartment. The two decided to have a dinner party potluck to show off their new digs. Game on.

I'm not going to post the recipe, because honestly I didn't change anything, so you should probably just check out the link above. Actually, the one change I did make was to sub regular m&ms for the pretzel ones. I hope this doesn't defeat the purpose of the whole thing, but they just weren't available at my grocery store, so I guess I still need to try them. All of the other layers were completed to the best of my ability following the original recipe though.

The finished product. It's not a great photo, because at this point in the evening we were more concerned with cutting into it. I suppose blog presentation is perhaps one of the reasons that blogger has almost 750 followers, and I have just under 20 (not that I don't appreciate every last one of you--I remember when I was still in single digits!)

I hardly need to go into taste on this one. It's a cheesecake with a pretzel crust and a chocolate mousse layer, taste was never the concern. Making prudent health choices is really the only limiting factor on this one.