Thursday, May 12, 2011

What am I?

A small puzzle for my reader. What is a "sand goflate c'est un"?

12 comments:

Chad said...

It's obviously a goflate made of sand!

Steve said...

I think I have a significant part of the answer. According to this translation of a French blog:

http://tinyurl.com/3onva65

"goplate" is "fraponais" for the french word for wafer (or biscuit) - which I then had to go looking for elsewhere, but it appears to be "gaufrette".

Makes sense, non?

I suspect "sand" is just to do with a brand name - the blog offers no explanation of that.

Where do I collect my prize?

skanky said...

I'm guessing on a communion wafer.

Michael Tobis said...

http://is.gd/Orow6C suggests:

Lovers of white faces inside

Just "Gofuretto" was Eh

But, the taste is really good. No, Really

Content as well, I'm maybe even joke - I Hosu (absentmindedly) ww

I concur, I believe it is a "gaufrette" or a dessert wafer.

cbp said...

The sand may refer to the color and texture, or to 'Sandwich'.

James Annan said...

(Not sure why some of your comments are currently not visible, presumably blogger bugs...)

"It is a gaufrette sandwich"

and I believe the writing is intended to be a direct translation of this message. It did have a thin layer of something approximating fondant cream between the pair of thin biscuits.

There's something about seeing the word "sand" written on a biscuit that seems to make it seem a bit dryer and dustier than one had hoped for.

Coincidentally, I find that "sable" as a biscuit type really does refer to the sandy texture. But "sand" here is definitely meant as an abbreviation of sandwich.

Michael Tobis said...

It Is is, or at least It Is is based on, a sweet which should be served with a soft ice cream or with a hot beverage. There was a charming and/or pretentious coffee shop in Madison WI (I believe in the end they couldn't afford the immense space they had filled) that had them free with their very fine caffe latte. (Oh for a decent cup of coffee in Texas...) Anyway if someone who has been in Madison awhile reads this, I mean the Canterbury bookstore/cafe that was at University and State. Maybe you can recall what was embossed on these, as our host would say, "biscuits", though I think that they were only cooked once.

The pictures you show are structurally very similar: a pair of very thin embossed wafers with a sweet filling.

Anyway, French or perhaps Italian if memory serves branding was elaborately embossed in each half of the wafer, and a thin, intense sweet vanilla layer was sandwiched between. These were semicircular, quite impressively large in area. perhaps a 12 cm radius.

These may not be quite the same but the picture gives something of the idea, in this case with circular gaufrettes

http://is.gd/pMqR57

and a claim that they are really correctly called stroopwafflen from Gouda.

Evidence for the embossing in a crude form is easily found on google images.

http://is.gd/LWsK9w

But I can't recall the brand that was served at Canterbury.

Michael Tobis said...

The ones I am familiar with actually appear to be from Minnesota in a faithful imitation of a native product of Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary, Czechia.

https://www.oblaten.com/OblatenHowTo.html

James Annan said...

That's partly right, but stroopwafel is definitely very different - that's a hard thin waffle sandwich with syrup in the middle, which benefits from being softened a little by standing on top of a mug of hot coffee for a few mins before eating (as in the pic). We sometimes pick them up when passing though Amsterdam airport.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroopwafel

Come to think of it, Starbucks sell them as "caramel waffle" which must be where I had them most recently. They are quite a chewy mouthful and much more satisfying than a sand goflate c'est un.

Kooiti Masuda said...

Japanese children usually think that "sand" means sandwich, rather than what it means in English.

Perhaps the spelling "Gaufrette" may have been registered by this company that other companies cannot use it. (I am not sure.)

There are imitations of Karlsbard Oblaten, called "karurusu senbei".

PeteB said...

James,

Any insights into this

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/noaa-ncdc-april-warmer-than-march/

which led to this

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/surface-temperatures-cooler-than-multi-model-mean/

James Annan said...

Um...nothing in particular. I agree that the obs are currently lower than the multimodel mean and am unperturbed by that - they have to be either lower or higher!