Holiday time is slowly approaching, but there’s always a good occasion to induce maximum satisfaction in the kitchen. Whether you buy the premade stuff to roll out, or craft your own cookie dough, it doesn’t matter too much. Make sure it’s nice and cold, floured well, and have at it.

I think one of the most satisfying parts of cookie cutting is the gritty crunch you get when you press the cookie cutter down into the surface you’re cutting on, feeling the metal plow through all of that delicious sugar. *drool*

Then you can scoop it up with a spatula and put it on a cookie sheet for baking! You might just enjoy eating it as much as you enjoy cutting it!

Buying a tub of grocery store cookies - satisfying.
Cutting through doughy goodness in the shape of hearts, stars and animals - wicked satisfying.

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You find yourself a moderately moist patch of sand near the shoreline. Hopefully the tide isn’t coming in to destroy your masterpiece too soon, but you have to be close enough to the water so you can make a delightful puddle hole. Scoop that sand out and around the edges to make a nice foundation as you get closer and closer to water. As you dig, you’ll notice when you’re about to hit the jackpot and then suddenly there it is - you break through to the water and the sides start caving in and creating awesomely satisfying sandy muddy muck to create your sandy satisfaction.

Grab a nice big handful, don’t be shy, and let it run through your fist, dripping all over itself and drying slightly in the sun to create piles and piles of drippy sandy wonderment. Some Satisfytes may feel opposed to sandy adventures because we all know that feeling gritty sand on yourself on any occasion is quite unsatisfying. However, this is a situation where the satisfaction outweighs the unsatisfaction and it’s worth the effort to push through your urge to run squealing into the water to rinse off before you’re done.

Keep on piling and piling, and before you know it - voila! A drip sandcastle worth writing home about (or watching someone else write home about. More satisfying that way.)

Perambulating Hammond Castle = satisfying.
Making drip sandcastles = wicked satisfying.

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Videogames and food seem to be parallels in this blog, and for good reason. These two avenues provide some of the most wicked satisfaction available. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the delight and privilege of making my acquaintance with the new PS3 videogame Soul Calibur IV. “Ugh, another arcade style fighting game?” you sigh, but this is where your assumptions are wrong. Soul Calibur IV takes all of the components of a wicked satisfying game and puts them together. Let’s review the wicked satisfying videogame criteria list, shall we?

• Smooth, appealing graphics with vibrant colors and yummy textures.
• Characters with spiky anime hair (see the other post dedicated completely to this phenomenon)
• An underscore that conveys power and excitement simultaneously.
• Loud, in your face smacking, punching, whacking, and kicking sound effects.
• The ability to level up and gain various types of experience points, thereby giving you something to aspire to and crave.
• The ability to kick other n00bz’ asses online any time you want.
• Finishing moves for an extra satisfying K.O.
• Moves that involve electricity and fire.

I could go on. In short, this fighting game puts others to shame, while also adding in hints of an RPG with the whole leveling up and buying things system. Oh and did I mention that you can create a completely customized fighter from scratch?! Yeah. That’s right.

So button mash to your heart’s content or actually research those 8 way runs and killer combos with your deluxe strategy guide, and enjoy the wicked satisfying experience known as Soul Calibur IV. If playing online gets too frustrating, there’s always practice mode, where you can repeatedly smash your motionless opponent and take out all of that rage instead of throwing your controller at your mom.

Sweaty palms from holding hands on your first date = satisfying.
Sweaty palms from mashing buttons and actually pulling off Kilik’s ‘Festival of the Damned’ = Wicked Satisfying.

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In any case, beyond the delight of actually letting a butter-cream coated, moist and delicious cupcake melt in your mouth, there is the added factor of aesthetic satisfaction to consider. Cupcakes are a very satisfying size - they fit in the palm of your hand and they’re usually heavy enough to be like “this is going to be a substantial snack” but not so heavy that you feel like you’re going to need to wrap it up and take it home (unless, of course, your cupcake is one of those massive ones from the grocery store. *yack*).

Sometimes, a cupcake has way too much frosting. I love frosting and all, but if there’s too much of it, I’ll feel kind of afraid to approach it. Too little and you’re left high and dry. This is pretty common at bake sales when kids’ culinarily challenged moms throw together cake mix cupcakes with canned frosting and spread it on like they’re buttering bread. Overdone confetti cake with a sparse smearing of canned frosting because you don’t like your kids having that much sugar? No thanks.

The cupcake that achieves ‘wicked satisfying’ status has the perfect balance of amount of frosting for the amount of cake and the cake’s consistency. The paper wrapper crinkles just so and the top is nice and round, leaving you antsy to disrobe that thing and get down to business (I was talking about the cupcake. Get your minds out of the gutter, sheesh.).

My obsession with cupcakes grows with each passing day, so don’t be surprised if I end up writing about more cupcakes in the future. There’s the mini-cupcake, the megacupcake, even the cupcake cake. The picture in this post is from a cute little chocolate/vanilla cuppie I baked the other day. The act of actually frosting the cupcakes was almost more satisfying than looking at the finished product. Put on a dollop that’s larger than you think you need, swirl it around until you push it to the edges, and voila. Vanilla buttercream satisfaction and a delicious prize to eat afterwards.

A piece of office birthday cake - potentially satisfying if only for the diversion from work and that creepy guy that keeps asking you for pens. A perfectly frosted cupcake at pretty much any hour of the day - wicked satisfying.

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If you’re not from New England, you’re probably like “um, what?” I think other folks refer to this as a milkshake…it’s ice cream, syrup and milk all mixed together so it’s nice and cold and creamy, often requiring some serious sucking power to get it up a straw. Beyond the satisfaction in the creamy consistency of a chilly frappe, it’s more in the actual container you drink it out of. I don’t know what makes it different when a frappe is in it, but a paper cup with a frappe inside makes a delightful sound when you put it on a table or countertop. You could fill the very same cup with soda and ice, and it wouldn’t have the same effect. They’re usually in those cups that have that retro 80s crayon scribble on them (see the killer image I wrangled up on Google Images.)

There’s this solid sound when you put a frappe down after taking a nice long sip (if you’re able to wrench it out of your mitt long enough to put it down because it’s so good you don’t want to let go of it), and it’s like “yes. I have a substantial drink right here. Oh, you’re drinking a diet Sprite?…man, I’m sorry about that. Too bad you’re not having a nice big gulp of semi-frozen creamy awesomeness.”

Free swim season at your local pool = satisfying. Frappe Season = wicked satisfying.

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1. You’re over someone’s house and they have/their family has cooked you a meal. This could be something as simple (yet monumental) as a grilled cheese sandwich, and is especially prominent when in a cookout environment. It never tastes as good when you make it, even if you have the recipe. This is known as other people’s food (OPF).

2. You’re eating something. Your friend/relative/complete stranger is eating something different. They offer you a bite. You have one, and it’s indescribably delicious, even if it’s a food that you’re not usually that excited about. Somehow having a limited supply of that food makes you want it all the more. French fries, nachos, or cookies are particularly dangerous in this situation because you can ask for them one at a time, but you don’t want to push your luck and have too many and make the person hate you, but you also have an unstoppable need to satiate your craving for just “one more bite”.

This entry focuses primarily on the sandwich. Someone else’s sandwich always looks better than yours. You both go out for subs. You get your usual turkey with lettuce, and your friend gets ham. You’d never get ham. But suddenly you start thinking back to that delicious Easter dinner and you have to have a bite of that sandwich. “Want a bite of my sandwich?” they say to you. “Oh are you sure?” you feign slight disinterest. You could take it or leave it, honestly. Right?….. but then you’re like “well if you insist.”

Then comes the sandwich trade. If you’re lucky, they will have eaten off of a couple of the corners and left you with a slightly squashed, protruding bite that beckons you to its chewy bread and perfectly assembled contents. You leave a lovely scallop-edged arc where your teeth have pulled away, revealing more sandwich peninsulas for the following bites you won’t be having (unless you ask nicely, right?).

Little do you know your friend is feeling the same way about your sandwich. Your sandwich is alright, but you have so much left, there’s no sense of urgency. Maybe you both tune into each other’s sandwich satisfaction and decide to trade half for half. But be forewarned — this could either be fantastic, or make the whole experience rather ordinary. After all, what’s the fun in other people’s food if it’s not theirs anymore?

A delicious sandwich = satisfying. Covert annihilation of someone else’s food = wicked satisfying.

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Ice cream season is upon us! (okay, for me every season is ice cream season…but whatever) It’s finally hot out, and the tourists have begun to flood my hometown. One advantage to growing up in a tourist trap is that even though it’s boring and dead in the winter, in the Summer you’re surrounded by delicious seafood and ice cream. In a one mile radius, there are 4 ice cream stores, and there’s another on the other side of town. Mmmm.

Today’s wicked satisfying tribute goes to the act of dipping a freshly assembled cone into a bowl of sprinkles. Now if you’re from Massachusetts, you probably call them jimmies. As it turns out, technically jimmies only refer to the chocolate sprinkles, so if you say rainbow jimmies, it’s wrong, and if you say chocolate jimmies, it’s redundant. I disregard both of these rules because a) if you say jimmies, the counter staff will ask you rainbow or chocolate, and b) the redundancy comes into play with my staple ice cream order: chocolate chip with chocolate jimmies. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Some ice cream places attempt to spoon on the jimmies to their ice cream cones, but that’s just stupid. Unless the ice cream is soft serve or super melty, the ratio of stuck jimmies to jimmies that fall off into the bowl is incredibly low. The hardcore way to dress your cone with sprinkles is to jam it into a large bowl of the delicious little waxy morsels and have at it.

For this process, it’s very important to make sure you’ve packed your cone well so that you don’t go to invert it and lose the ice cream in the bowl of sprinkles. Coming at it from an angle and pushing the ice cream back into the cone as you rotate seems to be a pretty good method. What you’re left with is this delightful cone that’s evenly smothered. Chocolate sprinkles are super satisfying because they’re all the same color and the cone just looks like this amazing chocolate victory torch that you get to extinguish with your mouth.

Next time you go to the ice cream stand and get a cone, ask for sprinkles and try to watch them in action. Sometimes they even invert the cups, too, which is super hardcore. I’ll have a chocolate chip with chocolate jimmies, please.

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Eating a meal on a melamine plate can be the difference between something that satiates your appetite, and something that truly satisfies. You won’t have that awful screeching sound of your knife slipping across a glass or porcelain plate because the thick, durable plastic of Melamine provides a scratch-resistant, utensil-friendly surface.

Beyond eating, though, I have a feeling that Melamine dinnerware is pretty amazing to stack in the cabinet. Can you imagine it? Instead of hearing the heavy clang of your heavy dishes slide on top of one another as you take them out of the dishwasher and put them in the cabinet, you’ll hear a softer, more pleasant sound of the plates and cups being put in their proper places.

Dinnerware is also one of those things that happens to be a lot more satisfying when there are several different pieces, than if it’s just one thing standing alone. To see what I mean, look at the pictures below (sorry the formatting is a little weird):

Clearly with Melamine, the more the merrier (yeah alliteration, w00t!)

What brings your dining experience to a new level?

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Honestly, the reason I’ve been putting off writing an entry about elevator buttons is because every single time that I remember that I want to write it and I’m in my office building, I’ve forgotten my camera. I want to take pictures of the buttons on the elevators here because they’re … you guessed it, wicked satisfying! But alas, I suppose I’ll make due with whatever I can scrounge up on the ‘Net and hope I don’t get busted for infringing someone’s copyright. (OMG in my image searching, I found a page dedicated to different types of elevator buttons! LMAO) I don’t know what this is either but it’s pretty awesome.

There are all different kinds of elevator buttons to enjoy - metallic ones, plastic ones, some with numbers, some stick out really far, others are indented, and my personal fav — the ones that have little plastic rings around them that light up when you press them.

Satisfytes most likely seek out things that light up on command, because it’s sort of like magic, and magic is a special power that makes satisfying things happen whenever you want, and that’s satisfying. Think about it - touch lamps, the mini-moon tap light, pen lights, Simon…. yeah, I thought so. You’re like, hurrying off to find them online right now and abandoning this entry because you got so excited.

But if you’re still with me, hopefully you can share in the appreciation for elevator buttons, both inside and outside the elevator. There are those triangular shaped ones sometimes to indicate up or down, or, the really special smooth and creamy kind that you find on gold-emblazoned elevators in expensive hotel lobbies. I love the scene in Elf when Will Ferrell runs his hands down the whole stack of lights in the office elevator to make them look like a Christmas tree (I’ll post the video next if I can find it). I’ll admit it’s tempting to do that, but honestly, I don’t really like riding elevators at all (Thank you, inability to outgrow motion sickness!). But if you’re going to ride an elevator, I’ll happily push the button for you.

What’s your best elevator button experience? Do other buttons satisfy you even more?

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