Tag Archives: Caramel

Passion Spice Candy Bar from Liddabit Sweets

27 Wednesday Feb 2013

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Passion Spice Candy BarI eat a lot of sweets. An embarrassing amount, really. Sometimes, these sweets are noteworthy enough to merit a blog post. In fact, sometimes, I seek them out specifically to blog about them. But most of the time, the sweets I eat are banal, or lackluster, or both, satisfying a biological craving but nothing more. These are the sweets that I scarf on my own time. Work versus play, separate but not necessarily equal.

However, I recently had an experience where a me-sweet was so good, so transcendent, that I felt it would be a shame to stay quiet. You, good readers, should be privy to this knowledge! I shall not be silenced!

Okay, so that was a tad melodramatic, but seriously: this one, the Passion Spice candy bar from Liddabit Sweets, is a winner.

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Schmapple Puddin’ at Sugar Sweet Sunshine

20 Wednesday Feb 2013

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Schmapple Puddin'As I mentioned in a previous post, dreary February is my birth month, and this past weekend was my birthday. As I battled vicious icy gusts of wind, I longed for the simple, sweet pleasures of summer birthdays: picnics, outdoor beer gardens, cake on a patio. But just because these things will never come true for me, it doesn’t mean that I need to deprive myself of a larger sense of “birthday”. Can’t I still have my cake?

Not always. When I walked into Sugar Sweet Sunshine looking for a classic, birthday layer cake, I was underwhelmed by the selection. SSS does a mean cupcake – and offers quite the selection – but cupcakes often leave me wanting. Too soon devoured, lacking fillings and layers and (often) complexity, cupcakes simply don’t satisfy me the way a stacked piece of cake does. For me, it feels more civilized to eat dessert with a fork.

So, as you probably know by now if you’ve been reading consistently, instead I went for the pudding.

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Chocolate Caramel Cake at Sugar and Plumm

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Cake, Uncategorized

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Chocolate Caramel CakeI am one of those people who associates cake with occasions: birthdays, weddings, office parties. I am not one of those people who simply eats cake because it’s a Sunday night and why not? However, I have been trying to adopt more of a, “You can become anything you set your heart on,” mentality this year, so if I want to become a cake-anytime person, then, dammit, that’s what I’ll strive to be.

So when I was on the Upper West Side on a Sunday evening, in need of a pick-me-up after sitting through three hours of Lincoln, I thought, “I can be that person! The person who eats cake whenever she wants.” So I marched myself over to Sugar and Plumm, Pichet Ong’s vaunted new bistro/bakery, for the very first time and bought myself a slice of cake.

When superfluously buying oneself cake, moderation should not play a role in the decision-making process. As I suspected (and hoped), the cakes on offer at Sugar and Plumm were decidedly excessive. But which to choose? If all decisions were so difficult, whole nations would crumble due to indecisiveness and neglect.

Eventually, after much deliberation, I chose the chocolate caramel cake.

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Apple Cider Caramels from Liddabit Sweets

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

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‘Tis now officially the season between holidays, with the glorious gluttony of Thanksgiving in the rear-view and the specter of Chrismahanukwanzakah looming large on the horizon. It is also the season between seasons, that limbo when the leaves have long fallen from the trees and the temperatures are dropping, dropping….

I am loath to say goodbye to fall. I like to indulge in apple and spice flavors for as long as possible before peppermint and eggnog take over, so any way I can prolong these tastes is a boon in my mind. Unfortunately, autumn apples are much harder to preserve than summer berries. Apple butter is a far cry from strawberry jam. Apple cider is great but harder to find and not usually portable.

Leave it to Liddabit Sweets, the Brooklyn artisanal confectioner, to devise such a thing as apple cider caramels to keep the apple flavor fresh long past October.

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Fig Jam at Recipe

12 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Bread, Brunch, Fruit

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There are a lot of people who think brunch in New York is for lazy wastrels who would rather spend an hour and a half in line simply to pay three times more for their organic poached eggs and French toast than if they had taken the ten minutes to prepare them for themselves at home. To which I say: sometimes a person wants someone else to poach her eggs or French her toast for her.

And let’s not forget the inordinate opulence of brunch offerings. It’s not just an omelet; it’s an omelette with goat cheese, heirloom tomato, and chives. They’re not just pancakes; they’re lemon-ricotta hotcakes topped with macerated strawberries. Semantics, sure, but it is nice to feel indulgent for less than $20.

Then, every once in a while, you order a humble item that so exceeds its promise, you remember: this is why brunch in New York is worth the hassle and expense.

The jam jar at Recipe on the Upper West Side is one of those items.

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