Yum: Pattycake Bakery's Chocolate XO Cookie

I've found a new dessert to obsess over, and it's within walking distance.

Pattycake Bakery is a vegan dessert shop here in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus. It's quite popular but also quite small, with just a few seats inside and a couple of tables outdoors.

Pattycake gets raves around town, but a number of things have kept me away since we moved here a few years ago. First, it's not open in the evening. Second, the small size. And third, the all-vegan label. I have absolutely nothing against veganism, and I'm sure many vegan foods are good. But if I had to choose between a vegan and a non-vegan dessert, I'm probably going with the one loaded with butter.

But last week I took a long walk with the kids and walked right by at the right time -- that is, when I wanted a snack. The day was beautiful and sunny, so outdoor seating was fine. I browsed the cookies, cupcakes and other desserts but knew what my choice would be as soon as I saw it: the Chocolate XO cookie, a rich chocolate cookie filled with gooey chocolate chips.

It was delicious. Probably the third best dessert in Columbus, after the chocolate cheesecake at Omega Artisan Baking and the chocolate truffle cookie at Northstar Cafe. (Um, yeah, I like my chocolate layered and in massive quantities.)

"This is GOOD!" said Edith, with whom I reluctantly shared it. And to prove I'm a fun mom, even Atticus got a couple of bites. But I really wanted to keep it all to myself. Delicious and dreamy, and only $2.50.

Making a Rainbow Birthday Cake

Paul has frequently said that his favorite flavor is artificial. I'm never quite sure if he's joking, but for his birthday I wasn't taking any chances.

Last weekend I made him a rainbow cake. 

It wasn't difficult, but it was very, very time consuming. Two hours is too long to spend on a cake.

It did look impressive though. And I'm not saying I wouldn't make it again - just not for a long time.

The gist --

Make the cake batter (I found a one-bowl from-scratch recipe, but I believe two boxes of cake mix will do) and split it into six bowls. Color each bowl of batter red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.

Bake each color separately in a 9-inch pan. Then let the pans cool to the touch and carefully put the layer on a wire rack to cool the rest of the way. Layer the colors with frosting in between, and then frost the tops and side. Voila. 

My first two layers broke apart, probably because I didn't butter and flour the pan enough, or I tried to lift it from the pan when it was still too warm. But the mistake wasn't at all noticeable in the final product. Here's the recipe I used., although Paul requested cinnamon frosting rather than cream cheese.

The frosting was the only thing Paul knew of the dessert before I cut into it. Luckily it was as delicious as it was surprising, and oh, so artificial.

Photo Friday: Nutella Lasagna

From Robicelli's, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
Read more here: http://www.robicellis.com/nutella-lasagna.html

The Best Cookie of All Time: Northstar Cafe's Chocolate Truffle Cookie

When I buy a dessert, it is rarely a cookie. I usually go for a slice of cake or pie: something big, rich and dense. But Northstar Cafe's chocolate truffle cookie fits the bill and holds its own against almost
any other dessert I've ever had.

Northstar is one of my favorite restaurants in all of Columbus, and luckily one of its locations is only a mile from our house. I keep meaning to do a blog post about the place, but the food is so good that I always eat it before I remember to take a photo of it.

As you can see, that was almost the case with this cookie, too.

The cookie is soft and moist, with big chocolate chunks accenting every bite. I'm often so full from my brunch or dinner that I can't even finish the cookie. More for home!

The chocolate truffle cookie is $3 well spent, and I hear that they are even cheaper in the morning if the restaurant has any left from the day before. Truly the best cookie I've ever eaten.

NYC Desserts: Brooklyn Blackout Cake at Little Cupcake

If Brooklyn blackout cake isn't my very favorite dessert of all time, it's at least in the top five.

And luckily when we lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I could get an excellent version of the dessert only a 20 minute walk away, at Little Cupcake Bakeshop. Unluckily, I live in Ohio now.

Blackout cake is a traditional Brooklyn dessert make popular by Ebinger's, a bakery that closed in the 1970s. That cake was "a three-tiered devil’s food cake layered with chocolate pudding, slicked with dark chocolate frosting, and topped with additional devil’s food crumbs," according to an article on the website Capital.

While I can't be certain what exactly makes up the Little Cupcake version -- the website doesn't list a description -- an in-depth investigation (conducted by eating dozens of slices over several years, of course) leads me to this conclusion: three tiers of devil's food or chocolate cake separated by layers of chocolate ganache, smeared with ganache on the top and sides and covered in chocolate buttercream frosting.

I'm pretty sure I just got a cavity writing out that description.

And Little Cupcake has chandeliers, too!

I love the cake so much that it made my list of the 12 things I'll miss about living in New York, but even I have limits. Almost every time I've attempted to eat a slice of Brooklyn blackout cake by myself, I've come to regret it. It's a dessert best split by two, or gotten to go in order to eat the other half of the cake the next day.

But don't get the whole slice to go. Eating at Little Cupcake is half the fun. Browsing the delectable cakes, cupcakes, cookies and bars, pretending I don't know what I want to order, trying to find a table at a window: That's all part of the experience.

The takeaway: I love, love, love, love this cake. When Paul returns to Brooklyn in November for the New York City Marathon, I've already made him promise that he'll return to Ohio with a piece of Brooklyn blackout cake in his carry-on. Our marriage depends on it.

NYC Desserts: Coconut Dream Bar at Amy's Bread

I like the coconut dream bars at Amy's Bread so much, I've chosen them for a birthday treat not once, but twice.

Just reading the description will make your mouth water: "A gooey layer of coconut & chocolate chips on a graham cracker crust." The thought of a coconut dream bar propelled me outside in the middle of a New York City heat wave just so I could devour one on my 32nd birthday last month.

Luckily Amy's Bread has several locations in the city. I went to the one in Chelsea Market, but I also sampled the dream bar at the Village location on my birthday a few years earlier. If you're further uptown, stop by the Hell's Kitchen store.

In Chelsea Market

The coconut dream bar lives up to its description. It's a gooey treat that's one of the few very rich desserts I've tried that isn't predominantly chocolate. But chocolate-lovers needn't despair -- there's plenty of that in there, too. Delicious.

The serving size looks small for $3.75, but it's so delectably dense that only the strongest stomach would want seconds. But I can't say it isn't tempting.

NYC Desserts: Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

As the thermometer rose ever closer to 100 degrees during New York City's recent heat wave, my thoughts turned toward ice cream.

Specifically, my mouth started watering for the many flavors of soft serve offered in Japan. OK, I didn't much miss the black sesame, but I easily could've downed a vat of either green tea or purple yam soft serve. But a trip to Japan isn't in the works anytime soon, so what's a girl to do?

That's when I remembered the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. During my last week in New York, the gods had come together and deemed me worthy of a green tea ice cream cone.

By the time Edith and I arrived in Chinatown on my birthday, the sun had started to set. That was excellent timing: While the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory is air conditioned, it has no seating and the aisle was only a bit wider than the stroller in which Edith sat.

Of course, I knew which flavor I wanted, but I also knew there were many others I wanted to try. Red bean! Lychee! But I limited myself to one sample: taro, a kind of root vegetable. Delicious, and if I hadn't already made up my mind, I might have gone for the full serving.

But green tea it was. I ordered one scoop for $3.99. Bonus: The one-scoop servings are actually two scoops. No complaints here.

I gingerly made my way outside, doing my best not to drip the quickly melting ice cream on the stroller. I'm normally the slowest eater in the world -- hey, I like to enjoy my food! -- but this went down the hatch fast so it wouldn't end up on the sidewalk. Better it enters my stomach at record speed than not at all.

Although the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory may be a tourist haven, it's one I highly recommend. Not everywhere in New York can you get such unusual (or what they call "regular"!) flavors of ice cream. Perfect for a hot day. Or really any day.

NYC Desserts: Momofuku Milk Bar's Crack Pie

I refuse to make some desserts. That includes any that requires you to make another dessert, demolish it, and then use the bits and pieces as an ingredient in the dessert you're really trying to construct.

That's why I thought it best to sample Momofuku Milk Bar's Crack Pie before I left New York. And I got in just under the wire. I tried it on the very last full day we spent in the city.

The Momofuku empire is known for many things: Chef David Chang, its pork buns and the crack pie being among the top. We tried the latter two at the Milk Bar outpost on the Upper West Side near both Central Park and the American Museum of Natural History.

Crack Pie can never be bad. No dessert is bad when the first four ingredients are butter, sugar, brown sugar and cream. But I can't say it left me wanting for more. It's basically a thick, rich sugar pie, with a crust made from a giant crumbled oatmeal cookie.

The pork bun was the real star of the show. The pork was so sweet, I wish that would have been my real dessert.

So for those going to Momofuku Milk Bar, here's what to do. Get a pork bun (available at just some of the Milk Bar's several locations) for sure, and get a slice of Crack Pie if you must. But definitely take a look at some of the other desserts I didn't try. Offerings like cereal milk, compost cookies and cake truffles are surely worth a taste.

NYC Desserts: Victory Garden's Goat Milk Soft Serve Ice Cream

Believe it or not, this wasn't my first run-in with ice cream made from goat milk.

I first tried it as a newspaper reporter in Ohio. If memory serves, the article was about the goat milk ice cream being served right after a county fair goat show. I think I had mint chocolate chip.

But when I visited Victory Garden in New York City's Greenwich Village, it did mark the first time I had soft serve made of goat milk. And it was delicious.

Victory Garden, at 31 Carmine St., is a little hole-in-the-wall in the middle of some very busy streets near New York University. The storefront might be hard to spot, but it's worth the time to seek out. It very well may be the best soft serve ice cream I have ever had.

I'm not sure if that was because of the goat milk, the extreme heat or the flavor I chose. Victory Garden offered four flavors when I visited: tangy goat milk, salted caramel, chocolate victory and -- the one I opted for -- rose petal.

I ordered the mini for $3.99 and was pleasantly surprised that the serving was the size of a baseball. It was slightly icy but mostly smooth and delicious. The floral notes were excellent -- even my burps tasted like potpourri, and that's no complaint.

Victory Garden was the first of nine dessert stops I made during my last week in New York, and it was one of the best. I'm only sorry I didn't discover this gem earlier so I could have had more!

I didn't share with Edith, but that's OK.
She had already filled up on her toes
in the subway on the way there.

My First Vegan Dessert

I tried my first vegan cookie.

To make a short story long:

Our local library branch has story time every Wednesday morning, and more often than not I meet up there with a group of Bay Ridge moms and their babies. Afterward we sometimes grab a bite to eat. So it's 30 minutes of songs and stories for the kiddies, followed by an hour of socializing for the mamas. Seems fair to me.

A few weeks ago, we took over Little Cupcake, my very favorite bakery in Bay Ridge. But what to get? I'd prefer a piece of cake of course, but my stomach would regret it. The frosting is delectably rich, and I almost always split a piece with Paul. Ironically, I'm not a huge fan of the cupcakes. I saw a row of vegan cookies and was intrigued. I'd long meant to try a vegan dessert, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

So?

Eh.

I tried a vegan double chocolate cookie. I figured you can't go wrong with chocolate, even if it is the vegan kind. And for the most part I was right. It was perfectly sweet, but rather dry. It was OK. Nothing special.

Today's lessons: (1) If you're getting a dessert and you're not vegan, go for the fattiest, butteriest cookie available. (2) I like butter way too much. This came home to me last week when I made a chocolate chip butter cake that called not only for two whole sticks of butter but a slab of cream cheese besides. If you're going to have dessert, HAVE DESSERT.

Black-and-White Cake: A Kind-of NY Classic

If New York has a signature dessert, it's probably the black-and-white cookie.

I've never had one.

It's certainly not because they're hard to find. It's pretty easy, in fact. But whenever I'm at a place that offers them, another dessert is always more tempting. Cake trumps cookie almost every time.

But at my favorite neighborhood bakery I got the best of both worlds. Little Cupcake Bakeshop sells black-and-white cake, and it is delicious.

The chocolate cake has two layers of frosting that taste just like the cream of an Oreo cookie. I believe the cake is topped with a rich chocolate fondant that drips down the side, and the outside is covered in a thin layer of what tastes like meringue.

A black-and-white cookie, on the other hand, is a round shortbread dipped in vanilla fondant on one half, and chocolate fondant on the other. Wikipedia has a nice description and photo.

I still plan on trying the cookie eventually, but ordering a slice of black-and-white cake at least makes me feel like I haven't completely missed out on a classic New York dessert.

Pecan Pie if You're Allergic to Nuts

Because Paul is allergic to nuts, we're careful to look at ingredients before we buy foods and Paul is accustomed to staying away from strange desserts. Yes, he's allergic enough that a single nut could kill him if the reaction isn't caught right away, but he doesn't care if I have my own personal jar of Nutella in the cupboard.

Lately, however, I've had a hankering for pecan pie. Don't know why; I like pecan pie, but it's never been my favorite. I could've just ordered a slice at a restaurant, but why take the easy way out? And when I found a recipe for faux pecan pie I got the best of both worlds: a chance to satisfy my craving and a way for Paul to get a hint of a taste of a classic nut-based dessert.

The recipe I used substituted broken bits of pretzels for pecans. The result wasn't exact. It looked surprisingly similar, and the pretzel bits covered in butter and sugar did have a candied nut flavor. The only thing that was a bit off was the texture -- the pretzels were somewhat crunchier than I remember the pecans being after the pie was baked. Still, it was a pretty close replica.

But the pie was nearly ruined by a new pie crust recipe. I hate rolling out dough, and I had a recipe for a crust that you stir up and then press into a pie plate, much like you make graham cracker crust. Easy as, um, pie.

It tasted awful. I think that's because the recipe called for using oil instead of shortening or butter, and the oil taste was overwhelming. I'd like to substitute the oil, but I'm not sure I'm brave enough to try it again. Rest assured, however, the faux pecan pie tasted almost as good with the crust sliced away.

Pie at Four & Twenty Blackbirds

I didn't get a birthday cake on Sunday -- it was way too hot to bake, and besides, I was in the mood for pie. Specifically, pie from Four & Twenty Blackbirds, a pie shop in an up-and-coming-but-not-quite-there neighborhood about 3 1/2 miles from us.

The inside was small but cute, a cross between a coffee shop and a flea market cafe. Wooden tables -- one large and several small -- filled up the space, and at least one person was working on a laptop. Still, the place was full. Luckily, a couple of seats opened up just as we were placing our order.

Paul went with the classic blueberry crumble; no complaints there. I opted for the black bottom oat pie as soon as I heard it was lined with chocolate ganache. The inside was gooey and sweet (almost like pecan pie filling without the nuts), and the oat top was nice and crunchy.

Although $4.75 might seem steep for a slice of pie, it's the going rate (if not a bit cheaper) for good desserts in this town. And the slices were huge. By the time I was finished I almost wished we had split a piece of pie. But really I was happy to eat the whole thing by myself. Happy birthday to me!