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Today I shall briefly discuss one of the more important areas of my martial arts training, which involve the methods involved in the handling and consumption of a custard slice.
As many of you may know, a custard slice is a pastry of generous flavor and sweetness, of great value to us, for it is not only delicious, but is also full of the most basic fundamentals that every martial artist and, indeed, everyday living being, such as us humans (I can and will not speak on behalf of xenomorphs) will frequently require for the purposes of nourishing oneself and avoiding starvation! I also happen to be fully aware that the Custard Slice can (and will, should you neglect your training) be a dangerous beast to handle; pinch too hard and the custard will spill out; move it around and gravity will urge the custard out further, and reducing the pressure of one's fingertips will leave the custard slice splattered upon the floor, with many of one's fingertips covered in delicious, sticky icing. Dare you face its God-like creator then and ask for another? Nay! Proper etiquette demands you eat this gracious gift from the floor, like a dog, you filthy coward! I have it on good authority that Bruce Lee himself was an avid consumer of these gourmet desserts when they were available in his favorite Greggs branch, and that Jackie Chan has, on certain film sets, encountered them as part of a lunch buffet... without injury.
So, first: know yourself and know your enemy, your prey; your meal, and if you lack the experience with custard slices, a plate will do. Cutlery can truly be pleasant at times. Personally, I was found to have great skill in the art of eating a custard slice by my sensei—no unnecessary movements; no undesirable sounds or squelches; no stickiness left on the fingers that must be removed with slurpy-tongues and sucky-wiggly-lips—and this brought green flashes of envy to my fellow students' eyes as lunchtime became a gauntlet of death in the small, though prosperous, village of [UNDISCLOSED] where many of us lived like family; no parents, but brothers and sisters in arms.
...And legs and mouth and nose!
Head,
Shoulders,
Knees and Toes!
Knees and Toes!
Ah, I digress, but here we go: I take gentle hold of the bottom of the pastry, angle it in my hand such that it stands perpendicular to the flow of gravity, often tilted slightly against the direction of the tilting of the Earth's axis, though this sort of thing must always be calculated very quickly and I may one day leave behind, as a legacy fit for any connoisseur of desserts and pastries and cakes and baked fruits of sweet and tasty human pleasure who'd dare to take up my mantle as the man whose blood is the sweetest of all humans, primarily due to a sweet-tooth more gigantic and petrifyingly powerful than any love of sweets or cakes currently in existence.
Once the pastry has been balanced, first form a blade with the tongue and flick it out, forwards, scooping out as much custard as noiselessly and cleanly as possible (these days, there's no spattering of custard upon my floor or forearms, or anywhere, for I have practiced!) and after the custard is removed, manoeuvre one's fingers such that the pastry parts of the coveted slice, no longer hampered by the delicious cold-custard, may drape themselves downwards, allowing a swift, large bite to consume as much of the top layer as possible, whilst paying attention never to bite one's own fingers or to accidentally eat so much of it that it either results in the rest of the custard falling out once you pull the pastry away from your mouth, or that you somehow whip off a whole layer of pastry, somehow leaving it dangling between your teeth with only a single hand free, custard shifting its weight and bits of icing all over.
No, no, no, should you do this, then perhaps it's better if you just focus upon perfecting your ability with the knife and fork at this stage because custard, as outlined in my 1844 page treatise on the subject of relinquishing our reliance upon non-existent numbers, foolish coins and notes—easily counterfeited, by the way—in favour of an economy based entirely upon trade of essentially delicious desserts, graded as outlined in the third, and also eighth, chapters...
Your incisors must sever the pastry as a guillotine severs the head of a traitor; and thus it is perhaps wise, often, to initiate the tearing of the pastry with one's jaw at an angle, the precious custard slice being torn through with magnificent powers of oral musculature; in this case, the canines serve merely to pierce, as they do in so many cases, and 'tis the job of one's incisors to shred the connection between the bite and the meal, and so it is that the custard slice is eaten. Choux buns are a tasty treat, but I have much to say about them and I am wary enough to eat only stale doughnuts (donuts) if they have no filling! However, right now, there's too little time.
. But I'd like to post a poem based around this idea... that we are spirits caged in a physical word, until we are released at death.
