Breaking news: the title of “best cinnamon roll in the world” has been awarded by unanimous vote to BUB Cafe.
Voting categories included:
Size: HUGE
Serving temperature: warm
Icing to dough ratio: on point
Texture: fluffy in the middle, toasted on top, caramelized on the bottom
Flavor: mercifully not bready. Hint of lemon? in the icing.
5 stars all around.
Ok, so you don’t have to get up thaaaat early, but read on for SEVERAL reasons to not sleep in and to get on over to Sugar Moon between 9-2pm Fri-Sun:
Reason #1: blueberry black raspberry scone with blood orange thyme glaze
Reason #2: brown butter blondie (henceforth known as BBBBFF) with salted caramel
Reason #3: CANNOLI CROISSANT w pistachio frangipane with a cherry on top was the cherry on top
Reason #4: hot cocoa cookie with cayenne and cinn
Reason #5: espresso cornflake cookie (low key top favorite best ever)
Reason #6: tahini chocolate chip cookie (ps: tahini is the new standard in choc chip cookies)
Reason #7: pineapple brioche with passion fruit cream, sesame crumb and salted caramel
Arriving at approx 10:32am on a Saturday, the line was 8 deep and manageable, and the first item to sell out was a twice baked pistachio raspberry croissant at approx 10:45. Not bad. Not insane. Walk up coffee counter around the corner to help ease the wait.
By the time you work your way through all these flaky chewy sweeties, it will be time for lunch so be sure to pack up a savory box too: curried potato fatayer, ham and cheddar croissant with a cornichon garnish, bacon egg brioche, scrappy dog.
What’s for dinner??
I know you’ve all been tossing coins into fountains and whispering to first-stars-you-see-tonight since March 2018, so let me thank you. It may have taken a full 5 years of hopes and prayers but I finally made it to The Salty Donut in Miami and proceeded as such:
What do we have here?? Guava cheese, ube pina colada, strawberry shortcake, white chocolate tres leches, chocolate hazelnut, and cookie butter cake. Carefully hand-paraded around town in the baking sun to really mimic the experience of “fresh out of the fryer.”
Let’s talk utensils. I used a fork and knife to divvy these up, but really I could have done w a spoon because all the fillings were so delicious. Maybe more donuts should be topped with baby pastelito puff pastry that can double as a scooper à la the guava cheese. When you dip, I dip, we dip, I double dip.
The ube pina colada would also do well with being dipdunked into a cafe con leche, and we all know that beverage dips aren’t my jam. But this! The crispy exterior was asking for a quick coffee plunge.
And this beaut. Fluffy brioche soaked in rummy three-milks sat atop white chocolate and finished with torched meringue. I’ll eat it, I’ll shadow box it, I’ll wear it as a fascinator.
A true testament to tasty is if all gourmands choose a different favorite. Chocolate hazelnut? Strawberry? Guava cheese taking us by surprise or cookie butter tasting like Christmas in July?? Hi, Salty, we can’t decide which is best so we might have to visit again.
We may or may not be connected by blood, but we are certainly connected by our love of candy!
While Sconza Chocolates is based in Oakdale, CA, they also have a small secondary outpost in my kitchen cabinet. Here, let me put on my Sconza visor and put down my Sconza coffee mug so I can give you a proper tour.
Of course we are stocked with the basics: milk chocolate caramels, dark chocolate caramels, vanilla sea salt caramels, and Jordan almonds. But have you tried the dark chocolate blood orange caramels yet?? My sophistication level went up 5% with just one bite of these slightly bitter morsels. Too elevated for your palate? Here, try the milk chocolate peanut butter caramels….I challenge you to not eat the whole lot. (Our last visitor could hardly contain himself, leaving only a single solitary caramel rolling alone at the bottom of the bag.)
Do you need some protein to balance out your chocolate intake? Have a chocolate toffee almond, or a milk and caramelized white chocolate cashew, or a limoncello almond hinting of the days of Girl Scout Lemon Pastry Cremes gone by. Would you like to try a chocolate covered cherry? Sorry, we’re all out….one of our residents ate both bags. But we do have some chocolate mint cookie bites if you’re ready for dessert! Or some milk chocolate coconut caramels if you’re ready to be transported to an island destination!
What’s the takeaway from this tour, aside from a handful of treats and an at-capacity stomach? The promise that there is something for everyone, and everything is handcrafted using sustainable practices and the freshest of premium ingredients. Now that’s something that this Sconza can unbiasedly stand behind.
Play back surveillance footage of the Glendale Americana parking garage circa 2009-2015 and you’ll have to scroll past hours of me stuffing cream puffs into my mouth before you’ll catch a glimpse of any perp. Ah youth, when I made the front seat of my car my dining room instead of ordering dessertS and eating them all indoors at a proper table like a proper gentlelady.
But Beard Papa’s is just that good – it doesn’t make it out of the car. Always freshly baked with customizable cream piped on the spot, it is rare that any portion of a puff makes it home. How could it even get any better? I’ll tell you how: add friends. I’m not talking about friends to eat cream puffs with, I’m talking about friends with which to collaborate on new custard concoctions. Hello, Aya Pastry!
Every Fri/Sat/Sun in the month of February, Aya and Chicago’s Beard Papa’s on North Ave will be offering two extra special specials on top of their already outstanding lineup. And so today, the first Friday of the month, I hurried on down and ordered everything and ate it all at a table like a lady.
#1: Croissant stuffed with horchata custard cream and layered with freshly sliced and FRESHLY BRÛLÉED bananas
#2: Kouign amann filled with matcha custard cream and topped with fresh sliced strawberries
#3: My old standby, chocolate cream in a chocolate puff. Please note you can choose a chocolate or an original, a honey butter, a strawberry, an Oreo crumble, a green tea, a s’mores, a churros or a variety of rotating shells and fill it with chocolate or vanilla, green tea, strawberry or horchata custard cream at any given time, but chocolatechocolate is my all-time fave for reasons that don’t need further explanation.
Loaf and lounge all you want, but do not sleep on this new lil cafe in Avondale. I know Loaf Lounge all about the bread (and so am I: the marbled rye and caramelized onion are chef’s kiss), but the not-bread desserts are oooooh so good and worth seeking out.
Exhibit A: THE chocolate cake – made instantly famous thanks to The Bear. This is like if Portillo’s cake was denser, richer, less cloyingly sweet….basically less of an “add mayo to box mix” cake and more of a “let’s make the most legit chocolate cake possible” cake. I would wake up early from a nap to eat this cake.
Exhibit B: the CHOCOLATE CRINKLE COOKIE. This is the best chocolate crinkle cookie I’ve ever had. And chocolate crinkles, when done right, are a personal fave, so therefore this is one of the best cookies I’ve ever had. Sugar dusted like a beignet, slight crunch to the outside, perfectly brownie corner-just-out-of-the-oven chewy on the inside, a nice 5 or 6 bites to finish. So you couuuuld have more than one, but don’t dilly-dally too long on that decision because they might just sell out before your very eyes. True story.
Exhibit C: croissant anything. On this particular visit I had a peach jam + bleu cheese + sunflower danish, but all of flaky buttery layered options are a win. I even heard that Merriam-Webster is replacing their current croissant definition with just a cross-section pic from a Loaf Lounge chocolate croissant.
(side note: instead of cucumber they put ribbons of honeydew melon on their smoked salmon sandwich, and I approve that message)
Fulton market. Let’s talk. What a clusterfuck shit show. Not to sound too grandma, BUT back in MY day it was a bunch of hot dog product warehouse buildings just beginning to host the occasional edgy art opening where it was still sketch to walk back to your car after load out. Now it’s a disorienting 24/7 Uber surge construction zone with a Disneyesque façade of industrial chic. I’m not charmed.
Be that as it may, let me let you in on a secret/not so secret respite smack in the middle of all this gourmetathleisurewearcorporate hood. Good Ambler. High ceilings, room to breathe, comfy seating, excellent coffee, and a pastry/croissant program that’s just as strong an hour to close as it is an hour after opening.
First, our “aperitif”: Passion fruit caramel ganache in milk chocolate bonbon. Raspberry ganache in dark chocolate bonbon.
Followed by:
Chocolate torte: flourless chocolate cake, dark chocolate mousse, milk chocolate cremeaux, dark glistening chocolate glacage.
Raspberry Pistachio gateau: pistachio cake, raspberry jam, pistachio “glaze”….. more like a pistachio/white chocolate bar.
Coconut ginger cake: buttery toasted ground coconut crumb specked with candied ginger (and, honestly, appreciated even more the next morning alongside a cup of tea).
Now, lots of places feature an open kitchen, but Good Ambler also features an open enrobing machine, complete with the chocolatier aka head chef right there ready to offer you your tasting assistant a freshly covered dark chocolate sable. HOT OFF THE PRESS!! MELT IN YOUR MOUTH!! HANDED DOWN FROM COCOA HEAVEN!!
For you and only you, Good Ambler, we will brave the newly cobbled and artisanally distressed streets of Fulton Market again in the hopes of securing a strawberry rose lychee petit gateau, each and every one of the chocolate bonbons, and a striped lamination chocolate croissant (or two….or five). Thank you chef!
“Ok, ok, let me pitch you a surefire, lucrative business plan: Maybe let’s open a tiny cafe tucked away on the second floor of a hectic outdoor mall area and we’ll only serve desserts made with mango and also some drinks. We will be rolling in the dough as long as customers can find us and also they happen to like mango!”
Sounds brilliant. Open 30 locations. Take all my money. What??!
And yet, that is exactly what Mango Mango Dessert did, and it worked, and it was comfortably crowded with mango lovers, and I gave them all my money ($32.18).
To be fair, they DO have some menu items without mango and instead with durian or matcha or chocolate, but frankly if you’re going to a place called Mango Mango, what are you doing if you’re not ordering mango?
I personally, will have one of everything mango. Even my tasting companion who was duped into thinking we were going out for ice cream as in “a scoop of strawberry with sprinkles,” happily gobbled up her no-choice-in-the-order mango ice cream. How could she not? A big scoop of mango ice cream swimming in a bowl of mango juice topped with sago and fresh mango chunks def beats some old turtle sundae.
Oh, but we’re just getting started! Let’s also have mango pancakes aka fresh slices of mango topped with fresh whipped cream and wrapped ever so delicately in the thinnest of thin mango crepes:
Last, but not least, we’ll need dessert. The mango mille crepe cake will do nicely. Did I mention it will be layer after layer of mango crepes/mango mousse/mango crepes/mango mousse for ever and ever and it’ll be doused with fresh mango sauce and garnished with more chunks of fresh mango? Oh yes, it will.
SO. MUCH. MANGO. Each of them so different in texture and really so different in flavor, too, even though the flavor is, did I mention?, mango. Never too sweet, always super refreshingly fresh. All best consumed on the premises ASAP, since – in keeping with Mother Mango – much like an overripe or underripe mango, a sat-out-your-car-and-then-put-in-the-fridge-overnight mango is just inedibleblah.
HEADLINE: CHOCO TACO IS DISCONTINUED
What am I expected to get from the ice cream man now? A weeping zombie Sponge Bob? A dreamsicle AKA nightmaresicle?
We can only hope that Klondike is pulling some Twinkies-circa-2013 bullshit here, but alas one cannot be too careful or carefree when it comes to something this serious. The future may be uncertain, and a “Historic Choco Taco” may currently be selling on eBay for $6,942, but fear not because (Chicago at least) I got you.
First option: a taco of gargantuan proportions from Lonesome Rose. Horchata soft serve, peanut pretzel crumble, chocolate dipped waffle cone shell, measuring at least like 7 inches – this taco tastes like a classier version of the original. Crispy – not chewy – taco shell, refreshing mild horchata ice cream, salty sweet nutty topping. Served on a tray with two spoons so it doesn’t need to drip down your arm.
Second+ option: a s’mores taco from Dessert Dealer at Parlor Pizza. Rocky Road GELATO in a graham cracker shell, loaded with marshmallow fluff, fudge sauce, Hershey’s chunks, more marshmallows, whipped cream, graham cracker crumble. Again, this tastes like an elevated version of the original. Better in every way. Probs what you hoped and wished a Choco Taco tasted like before you actually had your first Choco Taco.
And why not? Why can’t/couldn’t a Choco Taco be this divine every time?? Instead of a discontinuation, Klondike should be investing in a full Choco Taco spin-off line, because as you and I and Parlor Pizza realize, the options are ENDLESS.
The following statements were made by actual people, not paid actors:
“This is the best chocolate doughdough I’ve ever had in my whole entire life.”
“This is the best apple fritter I’ve had.”
Facts. Both facts. Old Fashioned Doughnuts’ apple fritter rivals that of Randy’s, and I witnessed the raised donut getting fried, getting glazed, getting put into my box. It may have truly been the freshest donut I’ve ever eaten!
Rounding out our assortment was a custard filled, sugar dusted, heavenly puff. We only got one because there was only one left to be gotten, and, well, that makes sense.
dessert.oasis 