After almost a year of searching for an affordable, different and decadent dessert place, I’ve found the perfect medium to satisfy my craving for chocolate on my lifeguard salary. Decadent Dessert Bar in Prairie Fire, which opened in 2015 by Small Cakes owner, Jeff Martin, is the perfect place to satisfy your sweet tooth.
Their menu offered a variety of desserts for many different tastes: cheesecakes, bundt cakes, cookies, pizza cookies and different specialty drinks like coffee and milkshakes. But, my parents and I were focused on one thing — the cakes. Standing in the well-lit pastry case in all their glory, we couldn’t help but notice the perfectly frosted slices of cake that were meticulously garnished with buttercream swirls, chocolate shavings and other icing decorations.
After bickering over whether we wanted to stay safe with a carrot cake or go with a lemon-berry mascarpone slice, my parents and I picked out one slice of chocolate cake and another of the lemon-berry mascarpone for a total of $15. The bigger-than-an-iPhone11 slices were more than enough for my parents and me to share.
If dessert eating was a beauty pageant, the chocolate cake would get first place. Its fluffy mocha-colored sponge was surrounded by a creamy buttercream and in place of a crown were chocolate bits and a swirl of vanilla buttercream on top — enough for me to swoon.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it wasn’t just a pretty face. Its rich and dense sponge harmonized with the milk chocolate whip that separated the layers and complimented the rich milk-chocolate buttercream around the outside of the cake. Once I got to the end of the piece and got a bite with some of the semi-sweet chocolate bits, I realized this cake had it all. Not only did they add texture, but the bitterness soothed my palette after a slice full of sweetness.
After ripping apart and judging the entire slice, I only had one part left: the vanilla buttercream swirl. It was the chocolate cake’s only flaw. It tasted like bright-blue bakery icing — artificial and overwhelmingly sweet.
After the rich chocolate, the lemon-berry mascarpone cake was the perfect palette cleanser. Sweet and tart lemon buttercream was layered between the cake’s light and airy vanilla sponge, and mouth-puckering berries distributed throughout the cake. The flavor combination could’ve been used in the scene from Ratatouille where Emile tastes real food for the first time and fireworks go off in his mind.
One of my favorite parts, besides the flavor, was that the cake had no icing around the outside. It definitely didn’t need any and the “naked” look of the cake only made the yellow and purple hues that naturally occurred in the slice shine.
For $7, I will definitely be dragging my friends to Prairie Fire to share a slice of cake. Then again, their menu was huge — based on the cakes, I’d be willing to try just about anything they baked there.
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