Sunday Brunch

I'm a fan of food from street fairs. Grilled meat on a stick, questionable egg rolls, pebble-textured sno cones--if it's overpriced and being sold where I'd usually be parking, I'm game. We're lucky enough to have a yearly street fair less than a block from our house. Right on the corner, the closest to our house of any of the booths, is a funnel cake stand.

Funnel cake had never registered for me before moving out to the east coast, but what could be better than batter poured through a funnel straight into a deep-fat fryer, the pourer swirling the stream of batter around inside a round guide to make a "cake" like a dozen doughnuts that have been blown apart and then stitched together into a plate-sized uber pastry! Sprinkled with powdered sugar (or topped with fruit, although I prefer my dough-and-sugar undiluted), it's a crispy, chewy, fatty tangle of sweet, heavenly goodness.

This year, I hit the stand after getting back from an hour-long indoor cycling class at the gym (the Fraulein's exercise obsession is mildly contagious), so I was filled with self-righteous fried-food-lust. I was the first customer of the day, and the oil in the fryer was crystal-clear: no floating little disturbingly-unidentifiable carbonized chunks or larger, disturbingly-identifiable soggy blobs. Just a perfect-frying-hot tub of artery-clogging goodness waiting for the pour. Of course, there's no actual funnel involved; it comes from a special pitcher with a narrow spout. But it's good all the same... the batter dribbles in, sizzling until it'll hold together enough for the guide to come out. Then the cook dips in with a pair of tongs to flip the cake for the agonizingly-long stretch of seconds it takes to get golden brown. Finally, the cake comes out, the tongs giving it a brief shake to knock off maybe one drop of oil (more than enough to justify thinking of it as a reduced-fat snack), then onto the paper plate for a dusting of powdered sugar. Thirty seconds later it's on my dining room table while I make a cappuccino, and two minutes after that I'm coughing up a big breath of powdered sugar from my first bite.

But I didn't lose any of the funnel cake.