“doll-sized.”
blackberry gingersnap mini ice cream cone, followed by mini scoops of 99% dark chocolate, duck egg, beet, bourbon-vanilla-sea-salt-caramel, and sweet corn.
When I was a little kid, age in the single digits, I loved dolls. It started with those squeezable characters in the cabbage patch, and it moved to the palm-sized girls of the Wish World. Eventually, I made my way to the real deal, the doll on the dream list of every female child born in the eighties: an American Girl.
Back when there were just five versions of these expensive toys, I begged for Samantha, “the Victorian beauty.” Straight A’s for an entire second grade school year finally brought her home to my arms, and immediately, I fell in love.
I played with Samantha every day. I saved every penny of my allowance for her clothes. Every birthday, every Chanukkah, I asked for an accessory: her bed, her nightstand, her schoolbooks. I had outfits that could take her from a 1915 sailboat to a 1995 ice rink. I changed her shoes; I brushed her hair; I gave her imaginary friends.
I loved that doll so much that I eventually had to mail her to the Pleasant Company Doll Hospital when her head fell off. [Yes, really. She came home in a hospital gown with an admittance bracelet and "get well soon" balloon.]
During the long doll phase, my eyes were trained to scope out and spot miniature accoutrements of all kinds. Though I kept a tidy list of items I liked from the American Girl catalogue, I didn’t discriminate against other appropriately-sized accessories without the logo attached. Samantha got vintage toothpaste and band-aids from my mom’s childhood drugstore set; she had a little car courtesy of my grandfather’s toy trucks.
As I outgrew hours of pretending, Samantha moved to a neat box under my twin bed. Yet from preteen to twentysomething, the affinity for the doll-sized has remained. Perhaps it’s one way in which I refuse to ever grow up: I believe I’d be as happy now as I would have been then to browse the Fifth Avenue American Girl shop.
And perhaps that’s why I found myself drawn to a new event this past Sunday, a dessert interruption on an errand-filled afternoon that took me right back to those days of the dolls. The distraction: an ice cream tasting at the New Amsterdam Market, a new find I am thrilled to have discovered. Of the many vendors offering samples that day – wine tasting, hard cider tasting, cheese tasting, bread tasting – the ice cream mattered the most.
Like a trip back to childhood, my companions and I were treated to six tiny scoops in six tiny cones. The late August humidity melted the cream fast, and so we found ourselves gripping cones fit for my Samantha, artisan ice cream dripping down our adult hands and tongues licking up every last bit. [Napkins were nowhere to be found.]
We ate our ice cream with the zeal my childhood self would have – it is one of the few foods I have loved since those doll-playing days. And yet, the event was decidedly for adults – after all, as an adolescent, my nose turned up even at vanilla [I ate only one flavor: chocolate, plain and simple]. Here, vanilla would have been out of place, as we were treated to vegetable flavors like beet and sweet corn, spice infusions like sea salt and pepper, and pure craziness like hay and duck egg [I tried both, obviously].
I often get caught up in my adult life: the wine, the late nights, the fancy food, the independence. But after the most grown-up of evenings – playing the role of maid of honor, making a champagne toast on my friend’s wedding day – an hour of sticky fingers and childhood dessert was just the balance I needed. Too bad my dolls never got mini cones of their own.
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obviously you were a samantha kind of girl and i was a molly (read: formerly crunchy granola gal). molly also went to the doll hospital (i unbraided her hair, which then turned into a knotty mess) and came back with the hospital gown and balloon. thank goodness for the doll hospital; there would have been some seriously depressed upper middle class girls in need of (doll) therapy.
i think about this theme often – straddling childhood and adulthood and knowing when to act my age and when to… well, not. i mean, i’ve still got my american girl dolls (ended getting a blonde-haired ‘girl of today’ a few years after molly) but obviously it’s saved for nostalgic purposes. it is fun, though, to reinvent these imaginary worlds that we once created all the time. i miss that. reality bites sometimes, but i guess i’d rather have a life-sized cone than a miniature one? :)
I think one of the best parts of adulthood is the fact that we can choose how mature we want to be – sometimes that means acting our age, others it means licking ice cream off our fingers. It’s a good stage of life to be in.
I am so unsurprised that you had Molly. :)
I collected American Girls- I had 6- but in 6th grade I saw a string of movies around Halloween when I was home sick about killer dolls, and they’ve been buried away in a chest ever since. Still kind of creep me out.
Also, Sunday was the best. We should do more of these tastings.
You had 6 American Girls!? My 8-year-old self is JEAL.OUS.
The Pleasant Company is also an awesome, female-owned company. I learned this years after wistfully reading each catalog I received as a kid, only to have my requests for Felicity rebuffed. Years later, when my mom read about the company’s practices, she offered to buy me one. I said no. I was 20.
i have the SAME adoration for ice cream. there’s nothing like licking it off a cone, either. in fact i have a cone of fro yo every.single.night.
it brings me joy and peace of mind.
I read about this market on Crunchy Granola Girl’s blog, and would love to hear a little more of a recap. What were some of these unusual flavors like – hay, corn, and duck egg? I’m intrigued.
The duck egg was delicious – kind of like a poached egg mixed with whipped cream, if you can imagine that. It was very rich. The hay was sweetened with honey, and I honestly didn’t taste much other than sweetness, which is why I ended up getting a scoop of beet instead. The beet and corn tasted exactly like beet and corn, just in creamy form, which I loved. But, I should add the disclaimer that there is little anyone could do with a vegetable or vegetable flavor that I won’t adore.
Trying all the unusual flavors was one of the main draws of this event for me – I’m all about combinations I’ve never tasted before!