Results tagged “dessert”

       

Click on the images for details on newcomers Spot Dessert Bar, Obao, Lucy's Cantina Royale, and the latest at Emporio and Death & Co, which just introduced their fall menu.

Saturday night's New York Wine and Food Festival dessert extravaganza, SWEET, wasn't a competition, but Anne Thorton's offering had people raving, and her table was cleaned out long before the night's end. So we're calling her the winner. Thorton's the pastry chef and event manager at Hotel Griffou, which has become both a trendy nightspot and critical punching bag (Pete Wells at the Times says, "I was treated worse each time I showed up.") We've never checked into Hotel Griffou, so we were pleasantly surprised to find Thorton's dessert—Salted Caramel Banana Pudding Pie—outshining chefs from such critical darlings as Locanda Verde and Per Se (not that their creations were anything to sneeze at, either.)

Remember that $25,000 sundae that Serendipity 3 was selling back before the stock market parked itself in the garage with the engine running? Needless to say, they haven't been selling too many of those lately, and even their down-market $1,000 sundae hasn't had any takers since last November.

Here's the latest installment in our ongoing quest to find a good, cheap meal that won't kill us or our budget.

Besides the sickening amount of mass-produced prole candy available this time of year, there's also an abundance of higher grade Halloween eating and drinking options. And so it begins; the long, downward holiday flab spiral that reaches its nadir around the first week of January when you have to start leaving the top button of your pants undone. Oh well, no use fighting it; here are some consumption opportunities we've been able to scare up:
• Through the weekend, the 2008 Vendy award-winning Treats Truck will be featuring Halloween specials including Halloween sugar cookies and Candy Corn Crispy Squares. (Keep apprised of the truck's whereabouts.)
• According to their website, "the ghouls of the cheese world" will converge at Artisanal Cheese on Halloween night. Fromager Waldemar Albrecht and wine professional Candela Prol will conduct a tasting of cheeses and wines "from remote and obscure places on a night that will be hauntingly remembered." Sure it costs $85, but freaking out about your budget is part of the Halloween fun.
• Sushi Samba's Halloween specials take their cue from the outrageous, stylized contortions of Kabuki characters, hence their "Spooky Kabooki" party on Friday at their Park and 7th Street location, with a costume contest that will send the most inventively dressed diner (out of all locations) on a weekend vacation to Las Vegas. Runners-up walk with $100 gift certificates, and special menu items include the Dracula dessert: Coca cola gelee, vanilla bean ice cream, raspberry foam and finish with berry blood drops & pop rock explosions.

Though it officially opens today, blogger Dessert Buzz was on the scene this weekend for the "soft opening" of the hotly anticipated new Upper West Side location of Shake Shack. It's okay to be jealous. The 'Shroom burger, the Bird Dog, the fries and the Custard of the Day, Shack Shiraz Poached Pear, were reportedly "all spot on. The Custard of the day was particularly superb. They had a designated greeter to explain things and hand out samples of the custard of the day. They gave me a remote electronic device to signal when to come get my food, which took about three minutes."

               

It was a sight to warm the hearts of dialysis clinic owners citywide: The massive, football field-size space la.venue at The Waterfront in Chelsea was overrun by 43 of New York's top pastry chefs and confectioners last night for the Food & Wine Festival's most anticipated debauchery. The event sold out before the Wall Street crash, and with tickets going for $175 a pop it's no wonder people queued up well before the doors opened to make sure they got their dwindling dollar's worth.

Cupcakes in ice cream cones? Has the whole world gone crazy? It does appear to be the case; blogger Blondie and Brownie spotted the innovation (or perversion, depending where you stand on dessert segregation) on sale at the Treats Truck at the end of last month. Of course, to a seasoned sweet connoisseur like Brownie, this is hardly revolutionary:

I haven't had a conecake since, um, my mom made them for me in third grade and I was like the coolest kid in the class for about a week. It was almost as awesome as the time I showed up back from vacay rocking the first slap bracelet anyone in my elementary school had ever seen. But I digress...back to the conecakes. I had to have them... The verdict. Mmm, good.

Sour cherry trees in Brooklyn (and yes, there are a few) are just at their peak, and the greenmarkets are flooding with cherries now as well. Sweet bing cherries are better for eating fresh and plain, but sour cherries (also known as pie cherries) are more flavorful and better for baking.

Clearing up a legal gray area, state lawmakers have passed a bill regulating the sale of frozen dessert products made with wine, permitting the sale of ice cream and sorbet to anyone over the age of 21. The bill limits the alcohol content to 5 percent by volume and requires warning labels – even though it would take two gallons of wine ice cream or one pint of wine sorbet to equal one glass of actual wine, according to upstate purveyor Jeff Kostic.

This cake is light and luscious, like a barely cooked chocolate mousse. It's best served with strawberries, which are coming in gorgeous from New Jersey to the Greenmarkets right about now. Full recipe after the jump.

This recipe comes from Joanne Chen, author of The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats. In her new book, she goes on an exploration of sweets, bringing in historical anecdotes, scientific data, and refreshing honesty about her own sweet tooth along the way. For example, when given chocolate yogurt to eat in the dark and told that it was strawberry, 19 out of 32 subjects reported that it had "good strawberry flavor." The one thing she doesn't give you, however, is a set of recipes for her favorite sweets. So Chen agreed to share her Apple Custard Tart recipe here instead.

This tart is something my mother made since I was a child, so I assumed it was her special down-home recipe. Sure, I loved those American apple pies, but hers (I thought) were unique, boasting elegantly sliced apples arranged like a flower and drenched in sweet custard. But when I moved to New York, I discovered that her pie actually resembled the apple tart served in French bistros. It turned out what I've long thought was my Chinese-American mom's take on an American apple pie was in fact a classic French apple tart--one that she learned in an adult education class in our rural New England hometown.

Continue reading "Guest Recipe: Joanne Chen's Apple Custard Tart"

Kyotofu is best known for turning out beautiful Japanese desserts, but this Hell’s Kitchen hot spot has been steadily adding savory items, and its new spring menu features some surprises on both the sweet and savory fronts.

Beloved and trendy frozen treat purveyor Pinkberry has agreed to a settlement in the lawsuit where the chain was accused of misrepresenting its product as "frozen yogurt" and as "all-natural." Pinkberry isn't admitting any wrongdoing but is, the NY Times reports, giving $750,000 to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, a food collection agency, and Para Los Niños, a nonprofit family service organization, plus paying legals fees of "plaintiff, Lisa Sutton, who said she suffered injuries and undue loss of money spent on Pinkberry product." Cue The Non-Fat Yogurt Seinfeld references (video above)!

At last, a gold-encrusted dessert fit for a working class budget. Unlike the $26 pancakes or the $25,000 frrrozen haute chocolate, these little sweets still have a single-digit price tag.

When you order chocolate mousse in a restaurant, the result can sometimes be heavy and bland. This mousse recipe is light and buoyant because it is made without any dairy, but luscious because it emphasizes high quality chocolate. Dairy products tend to blunt the flavor of chocolate, so if you want to highlight an exceptionally fine chocolate, it is best to substitute water for cream when making your emulsion.

The most expensive dessert in the world (pictured) used to be the $14,500 “Fortress Aquamarine” served at a luxury resort in Sri Lanka. But today Sri Lankans can choke on their gilded shame, for the Upper East Side’s Serendipity 3 has put America back on top with a $25,000 triumph called the Frrrozen [sic] Haute Chocolate. Break out your giant diamond-encrusted foam fingers, because the Guinness Book of World Records will now list this as...