I had an amazing dessert recently, which reminded me of two other memorable sweet courses. I was struck by the quality they all shared – absence of chocolate – and that got me wondering.

I adore chocolate. Seldom does a day pass without some: usually dark, bittersweet, and embedded with nuts. So how can my three best desserts not contain my favorite ingredient?

The first best dessert was an apple pancake, prepared tableside at Luchow’s restaurant in New York. I was around 20. I shared it with my Aunt Shirley, a beautiful full-figured woman who liked food, and she shocked me when she put her cheek next to mine, chewing the sour/sweet cinnamony confection, and described the experience as “an alimentary orgasm.”

The second time I ate a best dessert I was in my early 50s and visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a little place called Café San Estevan. The menu read “goat milk flan,” and I shared an order with Charles. Well it was absolutely perfect. Like the Platonic form of flan, it was precisely what flan is meant to be. Charles and I had to fork-etch a line across its top to keep each of us on our own side.

The third time I enjoyed a best dessert was just a few months ago, near my 61^st birthday. There’s a mediocre restaurant at the San Francisco Ferry Building called the Market Bar, and they make a goat cheese tart there. It’s the best cheesecake I’ve ever had or imagined.

As I type I see an answer forming. It’s not true that the best desserts had no chocolate, any more than it’s true that 67% of best desserts contain goat dairy. Rather, it’s that I’ve been blessed with an abundance of great chocolate dishes. So many that no one or two or three stand above all others. I need a smaller realm from which to pick favorites.