The One Dessert Giada De Laurentiis Would Eat For Her Last Meal

Not every chef invents a recipe for success. Luckily for Giada De Laurentiis, she's had a lifetime to hone her craft in the kitchen. The Emmy Award-winning host of the Food Network hit, Everyday Italian, and an accomplished author who has handed on the New York Times bestseller list (via Food Network), De Laurentiis had a childhood defined by cooking. As Biography describes, she came to America unable to speak English and was a victim of vicious bullying as a result. She turned to food and family as her haven from pain and planted the seeds of her career. She had weekly family lunches with her grandfather and enjoyed the tastier things in life at her granddad's restaurant, DDL Foodshow.

With a vast wealth of invaluable memories and a food-fueled career that – according to Celebrity Net Worth - has fattened her wallet to the tune of $30 million, De Laurentiis adds a rich layer of meaning to the saying, you are what you eat. And as a chef, she's essentially a philosopher of food who arguably makes a Cartesian assertion of self whenever she eats: "I eat; therefore I am delicious." So if De Laurentiis only had one last meal to declare her culinary existence, what would it be? It's morbid food for thought, and in 2016, she shared her thoughts on the matter with Health magazine.

We don't know about you, but if we only had one final meal to hold us over before kicking the bucket, we would want that bucket to be filled with deliciously crispy KFC chicken or perhaps something more on the nose, like funeral potatoes or Tombstone pizza. But as De Laurentiis told Health, takeout food has never been her thing, noting, "You don't know what's in your food if you're not cooking it yourself from scratch." And she could probably design a pizza in her sleep more skillfully than we could heat and eat our pre-dirt nap Tombstone.

For her final meal, De Laurentiis would indulge in the sweet, brown decadence of a seven-layer chocolate cake. She even has a plan of attack: "I would eat all of the frosting on the outside, then I would peel off the cake and eat the layers in between. While that might evoke unsettling images of the chef performing an autopsy on a cake, there's a method to the madness. "I like a scavenger hunt," De Laurentiis explained. "It's more fun, and it takes longer to eat, so you get more pleasure out of it." Sounds like a slow death by chocolate.

Considering that De Laurentiis chose chocolate cake as her last meal during an interview with Health, you might assume one of the seven layers would be made of irony. But hey, you only die once, so you might as well live a little.