Happiness in a cup

Topping off a mug of Swiss Miss Chocolate English Toffee

I have an addiction to whipped cream. Not the heavy-duty stuff. I prefer the lite version. (Not fat-free, though. That’s just icky.) The heavy-duty stuff, the stuff they add to your mocha at the local (or national) coffee shop, clocks in at 130 calories. Gasp! If I’m going to drink a mocha, I don’t want the majority of calories to come from the top 10th of my drink. Uh-uh.

Back to my train of thought. I adore the lite version that you pick up in those tubs in the freezer case. I honestly don’t think it tastes all that much different than the regular version. My problem in adoring it is that I put much more on my ice cream and such than you should. Eventually, it probably adds up to 130 calories too. But I get to enjoy more of it. More. More. More.

I’m not shy about my addiction either. Witness a couple of Thanksgivings past when we were visiting our friends Pete and Sherrie. They served up a lovely meal to us, capped off by pumpkin pie. I’m not a huge lover of pumpkin pie, which further kicks up my desire for the whipped cream. I politely asked, before dipping my spoon into the tub, whether I could have extra. “Sure,” they said. And I slathered a bunch of the white stuff on the top of my pie, mounding it higher and higher. When I looked up from my task to pass the tub to the next person (yes, there was some left), their kids, precociously young but considerably well-mannered, were gazing at me in awe. Ooops.

This morning, after downing two cups of green tea, I had a craving for some of the white stuff. So I brewed up some water, dumped in a package of hot-chocolate mix and scooped about four spoonfuls into my mug. Yummmmmmm. The trick is keeping myself from going back for another.