Have Your Dessert…And Eat It Too

Baby, this might, sound rude / I’m taken, but I want you / And I don’t want to play by the book, no rules / You say you can’t have cake and eat it too / But ain’t that what you supposed to do? / Ain’t you supposed to eat it too? / Ain’t that what you supposed to do? / Ain’t I supposed to eat it too? / If cake’s on the menu

-Trey Songz / Trigga, “Cake”

How is finding the perfect girl like finding the perfect dessert? It’s probably not, but it’s provocative? It’s all about the ingredients/traits, cold or hot, how much time/effort you put in, mix it up or not, and most importantly – who you are sharing it with?

Sexy Cooking Baking Mixing Time with M (part 四)
Summer Time Desserts (aka “what I can do with strawberries”)

Step 1: Start with a blank canvas (blind date?). But not just any blank canvas – heavy whipping cream (not that type of whipping) – this is a canvas that looks better and better as you mix it up. Sometimes you turn the blender on high and you don’t know if it’s working correctly – but with patience, you will make creamy deliciousness.

Step 2: Okay, skipping a few steps, but here’s the point of derisking: look at all the goodness you put in – there’s no chance this wouldn’t taste good. We added some chocolate-chip muffin pieces, kit kats, reese’s pieces baked into the crust, “fresh” berries, and whipped cream with condensed milk + vanilla pudding.

Step 3: Never let anything go to waste – good ingredients are hard to find – so we made made strawberry jello with slices floating inside. Some prefer the straight-laced, I prefer a little slant.

Step 4: Sometimes you turn up the heat, sometimes you chill out and see what happens. Sometimes you mix the hard and the soft, sometimes you let them rest in separate, albeit, connected spaces.

Step 5: Share

Desserts – Serendipity 3 and ChikaLicious

If steak and heels are the way to a man’s heart, desserts and rom-coms are among the keys to a woman’s heart…I think. Well either way, there’s nothing better than some steaming, sweet, hot chocolate on a snowy cold New York December night. What you say? It’s actually a frozen hot chocolate?

We must be at Serendipity 3 then. If that name sounds familiar it’s because Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack help turn the 50-year-old celebrity dessert cafe into even more of a a tourist trap in 2001’s Serendipity (movie stills below).

Address: 225 E 60th St (between 2nd and 3rd Ave), New York (near Bloomingdales and other shopping)
Price: add $5 to what you would have expected; we got three things for total of $30 / person
Hours: 11:30am-12am (S-Th), 11:30am-1am (F-Sa)
Reservations / Wait: Only takes reservations for lunch / dinner (set spending amount), average wait on a busy night is one hour plus, best bet is to make a reservation one day in advance at least and expect to pay for it

Okay, but back to the food. Honestly, the frozen hot chocolate, their signature dish, was just average and pretty much what you would expect. Other than the name, it was not much different than, just as one example, Starbucks’ blended frappuccinos topped with whipped cream. The size was big though so it’s perfect for two.

We also got a Shepard’s Pot Pie which was pretty jarring temperature-wise vs. the cold drinks, but only marginally better than Marie Callender‘s. Yea, don’t get cooked food at a dessert place.

So we went with another dessert – a special sundae with a piece of pie inside. This was actually our favorite, lots of different flavors. The berries were a little too cold to chew on, but overall, this was something that Serendipity 3 did better than other dessert joints.

Verdict: Only worth going to impress a date. Long line and high prices for desserts you can get elsewhere.

For a much better dessert option, check out ChikaLicious Dessert Club:

Address: 204 E. 10th Street between 1st & 2nd, New York (across the street from ChikaLicious Dessert Bar (more of a sit-down place)
Price: ~$3-5 for each dessert, small but shareable portions
Hours:  7am-12am (M-Sa), 7am-11pm (S)
Reservations / Wait: No reservations, should only be a 10 minute wait if busy (we got in at 8pm on Wednesday night with no wait)

We got a dough’ssant (best fake cronut I’ve had and I’ve had four different kinds), nutella cupcake (they have ten+ really interesting flavors), and tiramisu mochi (which was like a flavor explosion). The Dessert Club is a small place and grab-and-go. For a full menu, sit-down, date spot, the Dessert Bar across the street is the better option, albeit, it’s only open Thursday-Sunday.

Verdict: I would definitely go again and try other flavors, it’s great for after St. Marks dinner – assuming you didn’t already stuff yourself silly. To prevent that. we went here before dinner. Priorities, y’know!

Deitsch Eck

I’m going to keep this post short. After a long day of hiking in the Appalachians, we decided to wrap it up with a nice meal at a local restaurant. This Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant is no stranger to making delicious food. It was the first time I tried Birch Beer. It’s like root beer except infinitely better and more flavorful. Also their apple crumble with caramel and butter pecan ice cream on top was absolutely godlike. The perfect blend of hot and cold from the warm apple pie and the cold ice cream hits you like an orgy in the mouth.