After a week straight of smoking Latakia blends, I was up for a nice sweet Virginia pipe tobacco. I also wanted to pop open a tin from my collection that I hadn’t tried before. It’s a cold rainy Saturday morning, the weekend before Christmas. It’s one of those lazy rainy days so I’ve queued up Lord of the Rings in the DVD player and grabbed a tin of Cornell & Diehl’s Manhattan Afternoon. Today’s Agenda: smoke pipes, and watch Lord of the Rings for 9 hours. (You may have guessed that the little woman isn’t home today.)

In a word - WOW! I suggest you go out and buy as much as you can of Cornell & Diehl’s Tuskegee Airman right now. This is one of the best English blends I have ever smoked and I am going to try to buy all of it for myself. I just rented a U-Haul truck and I am on my way to Morganton, NC to Cornell & Diehl to fill up the truck with Tuskegee Airman. Ok, not really. I don’t want to be that selfish, but I will be visiting C&D in the near future, and I will be adding more Tuskegee Airman to my baccy stash. You should too.

Cornell & Diehl’s Kajun Kake is aptly named. It has Perique Tobacco, hence "Kajun" and it is a crumble cake cut, therefore, "Kake". We have another reason for the word "Kake", as it is a mildly sweet blend with its’ main component being Red Virginia Cavendish. When you open the tin you see a solid, slightly rectangular block that actually looks like a piece of cake or a brownie. It looks delicious, but keep this one out of reach of small children as they make take a bite out of it! It looks that good. The tin aroma smells like cake too - like a mild rum cake. That must be the Cavendish and maybe the subliminal suggestion of the cake look of the tobacco cube. It is quite interesting how this blend melds together Cavendish and Perique to form a unique taste.