as we walked that stretch of circular quay between the lego blocks and the cardboard cartons yesterday, we were stunned to see that a chocolate cafe had materialised in the toaster, right next to the dendy cinemas. mid-afternoon, after the rain had cleared, and a modest skyscraper had been constructed out of five cardboard boxes, we popped into the brand-spankin’-new guylian belgian chocolate cafe.

it was an impulsive move: we had eaten lunch not too long ago, and the kid was in that precarious mid-afternoon mood. but what do you do when 1. you stumble upon a new chocolate cafe and 2. you decide on a whim to enter said cafe? you can’t really have just a cup of tea and a biscuit.

can you?

well. we certainly couldn’t. as i read down the list in the menu (which took rather longer than necessary to be presented), the kid expressed her interest in certain items by repeating them back at me.

“cheesecake!” she said at one point. and then, “milkshake!”.

all right then. the dark chocolate buche filled with raspberry cream would just have to wait.

the dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake, though, appeared soon enough, a squat slice cut from a fat, round cake. it was surrounded by swirls and puddles — raspberry coulis and white chocolate sauce — and the kid went straight for the heart-shaped pool of red. the cake itself was dense and chocolatey, sitting on a base of slightly soggy, lemon-scented biscuit crumb, and there were clearly bits of real raspberries in it: we crunched on the seeds. although it seemed like a modest serve when it arrived, in the end it remained unvanquished. would this have been different if we had been less laden with lunch? or if the cake had been that bit more delicious?

perhaps it was the milkshake’s fault. though for something called “chocolate shake”, it wasn’t overly chocolatey. in fact, i wouldn’t even say it was chocolatish. what it was mostly, was a glass of cold milk, with a small, partially intact scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and the inside of the glass had been zigzagged with molten chocolate, which, by virtue of sitting in a volume of cold milk, had solidified completely. how very strange to have to scrape these trails of hard chocolate off the surface of the glass.

i guess if it had been an actual chocolatey chocolate shake, we might have died. as it is, we didn’t even get to the bottom of the glass. there were a lot of milkshakes going round that afternoon, and trade in general seemed brisk. when i asked the guy behind the counter when they’d opened, he said, only a little agitatedly, “two days ago”.

i really must work on getting my tolerance for rich chocolate desserts back up to the levels they were five years ago. you must know by now, the adriano zumbo chocolate cafe opens at the end of the week.