FE Contest #8 Musings

 So, I have two competing ideas for the latest challenge at fe_contest .

#1) Forde-centric thing with hints of Vanessa, designed to fit within the original 1,000-word limit.  Not that I ship Forde/Vanessa, because I don't, but in this case it suited the story.  Currently at about 560 words.

#2) Some lunacy involving the members of the Altean Kiddie Brigade-- excuse me, Seventh Platoon-- abusing the Rainbow Potion.  Because my reaction to FE12 is, increasingly, to avoid characters I've previously liked and just focus on inconsequential lulzy interactions between the new kids.  I suspect that'll get old real quick, because there's only so much you can do with funnyman!Luke, aggro!Cecil, serious!Rody, and innocent!Ryan.  Oh, yes, and Chris.  Because the easiest way to demystify the semi-mythical beast that MyUnit has become in my head is just to write him as a regular dude.  This attempt is currently at 590 words.

There was something more but it's cold and I have a headache.  Sleep now.

The Shatila Experience

Plug the word "shatila" into a search engine and you'll come up a lot of results re: a Dearborn bakery and the rest re: a 1982 massacre.  Today, we're talking about the bakery.

That research I did into birthday cakes a couple of weeks ago was for naught, as I sent my most excellent if slightly dilatory spouse out to get a cake for tomorrow's party and my #1 local choice (Bartz Bakery) was closed for the weekend.  Now, the fallback option was Westborn Market, which features very pretty cakes and tortes that aren't quite as nice as they look, but I decided to go for broke and we checked out the Warren Corridor in search of the renowned Shatila Bakery.  I'd recently had some "tiramisu" torte from there at a party, and it had nothing to do with tiramisu except the cocoa powder sprinkled on top but was very good nonetheless.

The Warren Corridor is even more alarming than I remember.  I don't scare that easily, but the road is so deteriorated there's not even any visible paint on it, and there are lane shifts and... ugh!

Anyway, I was not prepared for the experience of Shatila.  The building features a domed atrium with towering artificial palm trees.  The counters are heaped with golden pastries, glowing fruit pâté, and glossy white nougat.  Half the cases are filled with the most diverse assortment of Middle Eastern goodies I've yet seen in Dearborn (center of the Arab-American world, dontcha know), and the other half were filled with ornate French confections that were... well, ne plus ultra has to be involved somehow.  Chocolate lace and chocolate ruffles, jewel-like fruits beneath shimmering aspic, chocolate mousse, strawberry mouse, mango mousse, coconut mousse, nuts and sprinkles and powdered sugar.  I worked at one of the more famous bakeries in the Grosse Pointes and I never saw anything quite like this.

Oh, and the crowd.  You had to take a number.  I mean, you HAD to.  After several minutes of gawping, I took #32.  They were currently serving #74.  Yeah.  Fortunately, there was an ice-cream cafe over in the corner, so we ordered one dish of pistachio and one dish of walnut halva ice cream and settled down beneath the palm fronds to enjoy the wait.  Lebanese ice cream is in-between American ice cream and gelato on the texture scale-- more creamy than gelato but with some of that taffy-like texture and the flavors are very intense.  The walnut halva was kind of like walnut divinity transmogrified into ice cream.  So we had our ice cream and engaged in people watching; the crowd was exceptionally diverse for that end of town-- Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs, Muslim Non-Arabs, a Sikh family, an Indian family that was neither Sikh nor Muslim, and even some "white" and "black" people.  You've gotta have some darned good food to get a crowd like that 'round these parts.

By that time, I had a frame of reference for Shatila-- it was like a scaled-down version of the food counter at Harrods.  Both the decor, the masses of delectable food, and the crush summoned up memories of being ten years old and unleashed in London's most famed department store.

Forty-something minutes later, I walked out of there with a vanilla-whipped cream cake and a dozen French pastries.  I'll have to go back some other time for the rosewater ice cream bombe or the cream cheese and olive croissants.  Or the chocolate triangles, or the cheese pyramid creams, or the mini roses, or the....