Category Archives: Sweets

Homemade Pumpkin Pie – 2019

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Instagram Post 1/16/2020

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One more from my holiday home cookin’ collection. Believe it or not, it took years to get this Pumpkin Pie recipe right – years, because I only make it biannually so the upgrade opportunities are few and far between. First trick is to use only fresh pumpkin, and the small sugar pumpkins at that – none of that canned stuff. (Yes, I’ve read the propaganda from some who claim that it’s all the same – IMO they know not whereof they speak.) My recipe includes three milks (inspired by tres leches cake): sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream along with brown sugar, eggs, spices, and such. Here, it’s topped with homemade Pecan Brittle and whipped cream.


The view before slicing and adorning. (Yes, I add the pecan brittle at serving time so it doesn’t get icky.) The crust has been another labor of love, intended to evoke the taste of a cinnamon sugar cookie. (Perfect with pumpkin, right?) The flavor is spot-on, but the texture needs a bit more finessing. Ah well, back to the groaning board. 😉
 
 

Cupid Cheese Fruit Cake

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Instagram Post 1/13/2020

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Cupid Cheese Fruit Cake, a relatively new kid on the block, is my new durian gateway drug dealer. Find them in Flushing (of course) in the New York Food Court at 133-35 Roosevelt Ave, Stall 18. The menu touts Regular Durian Pie and a Super Durian Pie that’s even more abundantly filled than the former (you’re lookin’ at it). I was more than pleased. A return visit is in order to sample some of the other flavors – mango, banana, raisin, hawthorn, dragon fruit, and seven fairies – the last two topping my list. Ice Rice is on the agenda as well, but not before I run the table of fruit pies.

I can only imagine what this would be like with a scoop of Flushing Ice Cream Factory’s durian melting on top!
🤤


The #obligatorycheesepull
 
 

Georgian Deli and Bakery

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Instagram Post 1/12/2020

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Three delectable beauties from Georgian Deli and Bakery, 2270 86th St in Brooklyn; sometimes the only road to comfort is via homespun baked goods.


Pakhlava (you might see an infinite number of alternate spellings, but Instagram restricts me to 2200 characters) – loaded with chopped walnuts and golden and black raisins, punctuated by white beze (meringue). Pakhlava and baklava share the same Turkic root word but aside from the walnuts the resemblance between them ends there: three layers of rich, sour cream based dough in contrast to multifold sheets of gossamer phyllo leaves with sweetness coming from dried fruit instead of a beehive of honey.


Crescent Cigarette Cake – walnuts and raisins again, cinnamon too, a fairly standard complement for the region. Sufficiently distinct to include here.


Qada (you might see kada) – my absolute favorite of the three. Tight roll, tight crumb; butter, flour, sugar, butter and perhaps an egg yolk (did I mention butter?) – how can something so simple be so delicious? (Oh yeah. Butter. 😉)
 
 

Medo

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Instagram Post 1/6/2020

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Adorbs!
🥰
Now, if that’s a word that resonates for you and if you like Hong Kong style sweet, fruity, soupy desserts, then you’ll ❤️ Medo at 3 Bay 25th Street, just off 86th St in Bensonhurst. The décor is primary school classroom, replete with kids’ desks (but adult sized and not cramped) stocked with crayons, coloring pages, and the like. Expect variations on coconut milk, mango, durian, sago, pomelo, red bean, sticky rice, taro and the other usual suspects; bubble tea, mille crepes, and additional snacks await as well.

Cute interior design notwithstanding, I seriously enjoyed what we ordered. From the Snow White section of the menu, this is the Durian and Black Glutinous Rice option: islands of sweet custard-like durian and black sticky rice with its welcome contrasting texture floated atop the icy snow and sago enhanced coconut milk.

And yes, next time I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll be back.
 
 

Pan de Arroz

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Instagram Post 1/3/2020

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Popped in at Mi Mexico Pequeño, the Mexican bakery at 4513 5th Avenue in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, looking for a snack and grabbed this pan de arroz. Think of the filling as sort of a dry rice pudding, cinnamon forward, not too sweet; the pastry is light in texture although not in heft – a satisfying treat. Love those Mexican panes dulces!
 
 

La Flor de Izucar

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Instagram Post 11/26/2019

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I did a post a couple of weeks ago in time for the Mexican holiday, Día de los Muertos, and picked up a pan de muerto at La Flor de Izucar, 4021 5th Avenue, in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. I didn’t mention the other goodies I was incapable of resisting at the time though; since they were delicious, I am compelled to share.

On the left is their corn bread. It’s somewhere along the corn bread <-> corn pudding continuum: sweet, moist, dense and heavy. There’s nothing subtle about it – and that suits me just fine. I’m sure light, fluffy cornbread has its place, but this manifestation of corn masquerading as a baked good totally won me over.

On the right is their bread pudding – even sweeter and denser than the perfect cornbread, laden with raisins, the two inspire a return visit to see what other goodies await.
 
 

The Chinese Taffy Man

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Instagram Post 11/24/2019

Ah, the serendipity of meandering through any Chinatown, spotting a modest peddler hovering over his wares, and purchasing a taste knowing you may never see him again because timing, after all, is everything. The dragon’s beard candy vendor in Manhattan’s Chinatown is like that. In this case it was the Chinese Taffy Man on Main Street (well, that’s where I saw him) in Flushing.

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This piece was about seven inches long before I stretched it to the point of rupture so you could both take note of the slightly salty peanuts encased within and perhaps get an inkling as to the chewy texture of their sweet sheath.


It reminded me a little of White Rabbit, one of the first Chinese candies I ever tasted decades ago.

[PSA: Taffy is made from sugar, toffee adds dairy like butter or milk, nougat blends in egg whites and/or nuts or other good stuff. Oversimplification, but that’s it. In a nutshell.]
 
 

Kringle vs Kringle

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Instagram Post 11/23/2019

⚖️
After my 11/16 post about Holtermann’s kringle on Staten Island, a number of folks spoke up about their experience with the same Danish pastry from Trader Joe’s. So of course I had no choice but to purchase TJ’s version for one of my typically OCD A/B tests.

Trader Joe’s product comes to us from the O&H Danish Bakery in Racine, Wisconsin, a family business that’s been making kringler and sharing hygge since 1949, so their Danish culinary bona fides are well established; their website, ohdanishbakery.com, touts some 23 tempting flavors but I suspect TJ’s offers only almond.

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TJ’s is filled with a rich, dense almond paste and adorned with a lemony glaze. It was slightly smaller and featured a filling, glaze and dough that were a bit sweeter, perhaps, than…


Holtermann’s, shown here from the previous post, that boasted a nut filled nut paste filling, a sweet sugar glaze and a slightly more sophisticated, handmade tasting dough that seemed to have more of a from-scratch, small-batch taste.


TJ’s in its entirety, complete with a quarter for size comparison, as I did for…


Holtermann’s – photo from my last post for the sake of completeness. I told you I was OCD.

The verdict. They were different, and both were certainly good in their own fashion as described above. Then again, Holtermann’s cost $22 and involved a subway ride, a ferry crossing, and no small amount of time getting there and back again, but at $7.99 for a similar confection, I can walk to TJ’s in about half an hour and probably burn off some of those kringle kalories while I’m at it! 😉
 
 

Milkcow

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Instagram Post 11/20/2019

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If you’re a habitué of soft serve emporiums, you’ve probably heard about Milkcow, the burgeoning Asian ice cream chain that launched in South Korea a few years ago. Its target is the youth market – which you’ll immediately appreciate from watching the “making-of-the-ad” video on their website, milkcowcafe.ca, or checking out their menu firsthand at 69a Bayard St in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

They have two flavors, ube and, um, the white one. No, not vanilla. It’s milk flavor. Organic milk to be precise. But Milkcow is all about their over-the-top toppings in 16 combinations: macarons, Oreo crumbles, jelly beans, caramel popcorn, chocolate rocks, assorted syrups including brown sugar boba, or the Instaworthy signature cloud of cotton candy or hunk of honey cube.

In my opinion, you should opt for one of two strategies for your visit to Milkcow: taste appeal or eye appeal. My advice for the former goes like this: Savor a sample of milk flavor. Notice that it’s very dairy with nary a hint of ’nilla and rather subtle. Then repeat with ube. My sample today had bits of, well, something, in it – actual ube perhaps? – that didn’t bother me, just surprised me. Both flavors were quite good. Then enjoy the unadorned version (they call it the Milky Way) of your choice.

The surrender-to-excess approach is as follows: Make sure your camera lens is clean. Check out the menu. Choose whichever option you think will fetch you the most Instagram likes. Take the perfect picture from the perfect angle with the perfect background. (Unlike this one.)

Notice I didn’t say anything about consuming it. Here’s the rub: the delicate nature of the milk flavor is immediately overwhelmed by the addition of anything, including even the drizzle of chocolate sauce you see in this photo – the mistake I made and am here to caution you about.

Therefore, my counsel: Choose your path, cleave to it, and you will succeed in your mission. Don’t be cowed by compromise.
 
 

Holtermann’s Bakery

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Instagram Post 11/16/2019

My first encounter with kringler, the filled Danish pastry, was decades ago via an annual snail-mail catalog specializing in Christmas goodies posted from Wisconsin. (Racine is renown as the kringle capital of Wisconsin and kringler are the official state pastry.) Closer to home, the stalwart Leske’s Bakery in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is famous for their rendition. But I was unfamiliar with Holtermann’s Bakery, 405 Arthur Kill Road in Staten Island; a ferry trip and a bus ride at my dining buddy’s behest would enlighten me.

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Holtermann’s is a somewhat isolated tiny bakery with an enormous parking lot to accommodate the dozens of cars that bring scores of folks who queue up patiently for their delicious baked goods. (Apropos of enormous, that’s a quarter in there.) Some kringler are pretzel shaped; these are vaguely reminiscent of a kid’s slot car race track, flat and oval, but that’s where the similarity ends. This sweet confection, along with a cup of hot coffee, amply provided breakfast on several frosty mornings.


Revealing the filling of sweet nut paste plus nut pieces and the generous application of sweet icing. Did I mention sweet yet?


Perhaps more decadent (and yes, perhaps more sweet) was this chocolate almond ring with…
…gobs of almond paste supporting chocolate glaze and slivered almonds – and there was some cake in there as well.

The family owned and operated business has been around since 1878 so obviously they know how to put a smile on people’s faces. They did on mine. 😋