I don’t talk about food too often on this site…well, except for chocolate…but I ran across this restaurant menu item from The Drunken Monkey in Fort Collins, Colorado and couldn’t resist continuing the name theme started by Alan Orloff at A Million Blogging Monkeys: Ptomaine’s House of Beef.

Monkey Balls (this restaurant version, anyway) are made from cheesecake, deep fried, then drowned in ice cream, whipped cream, and hot fudge. Sounds decadent, and I wouldn’t try it at home. But if you’re ever in Northern Colorado, you might want to check it out.

Death by Chocolate comes in many forms, but I tried one in a restaurant in Florida many years ago and it nearly finished me. I thought I really was going to die. Eventually my taste for chocolate returned, thank goodness.

Snickerdoodles are my favorite cookies of all time. I’ve been making them since I was a kid, and that was a really, really long time ago. When my own kids were little, I let them roll the dough and dip it into the cinnamon, sugar mixture for me. They saved me a lot of work, and they were having fun with no thoughts of actually being helpful.

Blueberry Grunt (also known as blueberry slump) is made with blueberries and a sweet dumpling dough.

My paternal grandmother used to make her In a Bowl Put cake for dessert. As far as we knew, it had no other name and there was no written recipe. It was always good, though.

What’s in a name? Well, I was interested enough in a dessert called Monkey Balls to read on and see what it was, more so than if the restaurant had called it Cheesecake Bites.

I’m just as likely to look more closely at a book in a book review or in the bookstore if it has an intriguing title, especially if it also has a great cover. Names and titles, just like presentation, are effective tools for attracting attention and making a sale.

This post was first published here on August 3, 2010