A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I gathered some friends together to squelch our mutual curiosity for a tiny, scarlet berry and it’s “miraculous” effects.

The gathering was called flavor tripping, and the berry is deemed Miracle Fruit. Eating one of these will weird-out your tastebuds to varying degrees and allow you to experience food in a different way – by ditching some of their nature-intended flavor profiles for radically different ones. The promise was that acids and sour foods would take on sweeter notes, while already sweet foods would become cloying. It sounded too good to be true. And in some respects, it is. It’s a crapshoot, really.

First, you bite into the berry, roll the pulp around your tongue for a few minutes (to coat tastebuds) and spit out the seed. If you’ve done it right, it’s effects should last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the potency of the individual fruit, and, as Wired magazine speculates, depending on your genetic makeup. There’s no guarantee that it will work, and no guarantee of how long it will work. You just have to trust that it will. And for the most part, it did: A few people reported that the berry worked instantly, but others say the effects were extremely subtle until a second berry was ingested. (I had ordered extra berries for this scenario.)

For their price ($3 each), they’re not anything you would reach for when you want a snack (and the Miracle Fruit’s taste isn’t anything to write home about, either). So, are they worth it? Read on for the rundown and some comments from flavor-trippers.

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This Friday Link Love is brought to you by the adorable little Daschund (lookit the smile on his face!) that surfaced on the Internet months ago. I’ve found some other equally small and/or sweet blurbs from the culinary world for your perusal. Have a good one!

• Food & Wine magazine names its Best New Chefs of 2009.
• David Lebovitz encourages unusual flavors of homemade ice cream (carrot cake ice cream!) for the LA Times.
• The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery tackles Devil’s Food Twinkies with peanut butter filling.
• How sweet it is: Pie of the Tiger offers a step-by-step lesson in sugar casting bowls. Eat the fruit, and the bowl, too.
• Serious Eats celebrates the (possible) birthday of the ice cream sundae.

– Cynthia Furey

March Madness was tough! Thank you all for reading. Here’s a recap in case you missed anything, and stay tuned for a Friday Link Love and new posts next week.

My quest for farm-to-table cooking comes to a screeching halt when I’m faced with unshelled macadamia nuts, which I tried to crack with a hammer and a towel. My neighbors think I’m nuts.

• A cheesecake for sugar freaks and perfectionists: One heck of a cheesecake, with more frill and decoration than a 6-year-old’s Easter Sunday dress.

Green velvet cupcakes from the Layer Cake Bakery in Irvine, Calif., make me wish that St. Patrick’s Day would come more than just once a year.
Kitchen voyeurism: You can tell a lot about a chef just by peering into his kitchen.
Easy recipes for Croque Madame and Croque Monsieur, published in my Food 101 column in The Orange County Register.
Link love, brought to you by Gumduck. Also other collections of interesting links here, here and here.
A perfect day at Taylor’s Refresher, with a perfect burger to match.
Learning how to make Okonomiyaki with my friend Mark, who spent a few years in Japan perfecting his methods (while teaching English).

• Some thoughts on a new study that claims eating red meat is bad for your health — “deadly” according to one news outlet.
• Syllable and Sustenance: A relationship I’ve imagined between the Vietnamese language and its food.
• The Scharffen Berger plant in Berkeley, Calif., closes.
• A first visit to Pizzeria Ortica, David Myers’ new pizza place in Costa Mesa, Calif.

A quick recipe for roasted potatoes with rosemary and olive oil.
Dining at the Ramos House Cafe, in a picture-perfect, historical California setting.

Flying Food: Tales of a kid who sends her food airborne in hopes of fooling her mother into thinking she ate them. (Reader comments on this post are super-hilarious.)

On April 30, the Cook’s Library will close its doors after 20 years of being the go-to spot in Southern California for cookbooks and culinary literature.
Some notes on the Roquefort tariff, plus some weird food laws that still exist today.
The seven steps you need to perform to ensure an excellent dim sum meal.
And finally, 30 restaurants in one go at the L.A. Weekly’s Gold Standard.

– Cynthia Furey