Dessert to Go Is the Way to Go in West Roxbury

They tell us that the most important meal of the day is breakfast. I’ve always strongly believed that the most important part of any meal is the dessert. But I’ve also found that desserts at most good restaurants are either too heavy or, in many cases, too expensive. So, getting myself in a dining-at-home spirit, I drove around West Roxbury looking for just the right take out dessert to follow up, say, a chicken dinner at the kitchen table. I winnowed my choices down to three that were delicious and affordable and greatly helped to satisfy my sweet tooth.

BROWNIE SUNDAE  (, $1.79 – on sale for 92 cents)

It consists of four layers of, from the bottom up, a moist, fairly rich, cakey chocolate brownie, slightly sweet whipped cream, brownie
again, cream again, and topped with a generous amount of bittersweet chocolate chips and a drizzle of firm chocolate sauce. There’s more cream than cake, but enough cake so that the cream doesn’t overwhelm it. The scary looking maraschino cherry on top had a chemical taste and was immediately spat out. Minus the cherry, it goes well with red wine.

HALF MOON  (, $1.79)

The favorite dessert of my childhood (I think my parents used to get them at Eagerman’s Bagels in Dorchester) was this round usually dry
vanilla cake topped with a thin patina of hard frosting – half of it chocolate, the other half vanilla (it looked like a half moon). This treat has come a long way. The new version has about the same small circumference (just under five inches) but it consists of a dense vanilla pillow cookie flavored with just a hint of lemon, covered with a big, soft, fluffy pile of brown and white frostings that’s as thick as the cake below. Both frostings are subtle rather than rich. I couldn’t pick a favorite between them.

TIRAMISU  (., $3.99)

The classic Italian dessert gets the five-layer treatment here. At the bottom is a slightly stale quarter-inch round of chocolate cake, nicely offset above by a tier of very rich mocha pudding, a bit of moist, understated rum cake on top of that, then more mocha pudding, capped off by a blob of too-sweet whipped cream that’s crowned with some cocoa powder. A chocolate bean rests on top. There are so many ways to make tiramisu, it would be unfair to say this isn’t a
traditional version. It’s quite good but would be even better if there was more rum cake and less mocha pudding. I’m thinking of trying it again, with hopes that the chocolate cake will be fresher. Hint: Don’t eat this one layer at a time. Try to get a taste of everything at once. It’s quite yummy.

One other thing. It would be best not to do what I did. At around 8 p.m., after that roast chicken dinner, I ate all three desserts in a row, spread out over a 15-minute period. I was in sugar shock for about an
hour.