The things I do for you people

From across the crowded food court I saw what appeared to be a six-foot photo of a deep fried cheese treat. It had a crumbed outer coating and was split in two, revealing what I thought to be a molten cheddar centre. Having been peripherally involved in the early stages of Chibble development, I was intrigued by what seemed to be an entire food station revolving around a deep-fried dairy product.

I got closer and saw their logo:

Puffy wasn’t a name I was familiar with and I couldn’t wait to see how they backed up the claim that liquid fat surrounded by carbohydrate cooked in fat was “fresh ‘n natural”. It was only once I got up close that I realized the bite-sized cheese treats I’d seen were in fact tennis ball-sized filled biscuits.

Having got this far I couldn’t rightly turn back so I coughed up the $1.60 they were asking and was presented with a dessert dumpling. I took a bite and was surprised to find that the centre was actually cold vanilla custard. Combined with a cake-ish, biscuity outside it was actually quite nice but I think they’re really stretching things by describing it as “The classic traditional cookie puff”. I’ve certainly never heard of a cookie puff before and I’m sure that some wiz-bang food science had gone on behind the scenes to inject the cold filling into the baked outside. It was actually quite nice and didn’t leave me feeling like an overweight policeman as doughnuts can sometime do but it was over engineered. I think I'd compare the experience with a Freak Show: You visit once to say that you've been but if you visit more than that you can't explain it away as gathering material for your blog.

Epilogue - I didn’t have my camera on me so I tried to find a picture of the "classic traditional cookie puff" on the web but I can’t find hide nor hair of them. Any entries for “Puffy” are references to:

• Puffy – a manufactured Japanese girlband.
• Sean “Puffy” Puff Daddy” “P. Diddy” “Diddy” Combs who is took the above J-Pop band to court to secure his right to be the only Puffy on stage in America. When asked if they were worried about having to change their name in the States, Puffy (the Japanese girls) said, “The bottom line is that we don't know what puffy means. We were given our name by somebody else six years ago, and we really don't have a clue.”
• Sites devoted to breasts with ‘Puffy nipples’. An entire fetish subculture I wish I’d never heard of.
• And of course, the classic Puffy shirt episode of Seinfeld.