Desserts that make me go heart-eyed

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, I write about the sweets that make me go 😻. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.

Rose creams from Fortnum and Mason

181 Piccadilly, St. James's, London W1A 1ER, UK, or online

My mother, who wears only black t-shirts and studied existential French plays at La Sorbonne, raised me to be a good, anti-capitalist feminist. At an early age, we were taught that roses and diamond rings were nothing but cheap bribes in the game of love, that true affection could never be expressed in the language of gifts. Unfortunately, this tactic backfired, because nothing elevates something to a god-like status more to children than making it forbidden. Of all the small luxuries, all of which I adore, nothing makes me go more heart-eyed than a box of nicely wrapped fancy chocolates. Fortnum and Mason is a fancy-pants department store in London, although I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never been there. What I do know is that they make lovely gift boxes of chocolates, with gold embossed owls and beautiful lettering on the outside, and a paper sheath that opens up like an envelope inside. And everyone knows that the most heart-eyed of all heart-eyed chocolate flavors is rose. Never mind that chocolate creams are actually not the most delicious candies. In fact, they kind of taste like perfume coated in chocolate. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the whole thing is so perfectly packaged, scented like flowers, and topped off with a tiny perfect little crystallized petal of rose. 😻.

P.S. If you’re on the hunt for a token of affection, and live far from London, I suggest L.A. Burdick in New York and Boston, where I buy myself a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day every year.

Oat milk chocolate pudding from the New York Times 

At my kitchen, past midnight

“Chocolate pudding is equal parts comfort and romance, which means it’s great accompanied by sweatpants, candlelight or both,” the intro to the recipe for this oat milk chocolate pudding begins. Woah there, chocolate pudding, I scoffed. Aren’t you waxing a wee bit poetic for something that I associate with being an after-school snack? But then I made this pudding, standing in my kitchen in an old t-shirt and flip-flops past midnight, a dim lamp lighting the counter. I turned on a little Johnny Cash, and poured myself a little bit of leftover rosé. And as the smell of dark chocolate wafted off of the stove, I thought of all the great love stories I ever wrote myself into, wisely and unwisely so, the other person sometimes wittingly and other times unwittingly made the protagonist. By the time I finished my thought, the pudding had thickened, leaving a silky trail behind the spatula. It was perfectly smooth, and it tasted just like the dark chocolate bar I stirred into it, with no eggs or cream to dilute the flavor. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, this recipe is onto something.  

Earl grey cream puffs from Bibble & Sip

253 W 51st St, New York, NY 10019

The cream puffs at Bibble & Sip, home of the infamous “Biggie” (aka unlicensed totoro) macaron are about 95% cream and 5% puff, and that’s a Very Good Thing, because the cream in this puff is swoon-worthy. It’s smooth and silky and tastes exactly like ice cream that doesn’t melt, like some kind of beautiful miracle of food science. Our blessed co-worker Agnes brought in four of these oversized cream puffs to our cubicle row, in the flavors black sesame, matcha tea, cookies and cream, and earl grey. While the cookies and cream puff was the crowd favorite, in a surprising turn of events, we all agreed that the earl grey flavor was the critic’s choice, the cream so floral and light, it tasted especially silken and refined.

Havanna alfajores covered with dark chocolate at my office

Available in Argentina, and online

Alfajores are the unofficial* cookie of Argentina, and they are absolutely delicious. They’re up against Tim Tams in my personal rankings of Cookies of the World. For the uninitiated, alfajores are two crumbly, delicate, shortbread cookies sandwiched with a thick layer of dulce de leche and (sometimes) dipped in a thin layer of chocolate. They’re perfect dipped in tea or coffee. “Of course, the best alfajores are homemade, and none compare to the ones made by a neighbor of my grandparents,” said Diego, newsroom alfajor evangelist. “Nobody else has been able to replicate the perfection of hers.” But for everyone else, Havanna is the gold standard.

*As far as I know.

Custard and bubble wheel cake at Catmint Wheel Cake

124 Macdougal St, New York, NY 10012

I’ve walked past Catmint Wheel Cake many a time on Macdougal street, but could not for the life of me figure out what that string of words, each more intriguing than the next, meant. It turns out that wheel cakes are a Japanese festival dessert, made popular in Taiwan. They taste kinda similar to Taiyaki, those cute, fish-shaped pancakes filled with red bean, expect they are small, thick disks (wheels) instead. The word catmint, on the other hand, seems to have no meaning except to be adorably intriguing. At the store, there is an array of options for filling your wheel cake, all demonstrated by cute illustrations. My coworkers went with banana-chocolate (verdict: extremely chocolate-y) and matcha (had both mochi and red bean inside!), while I chose custard with bubble. The wheel cake was extremely hot off the griddle, with an explosion of custard inside (I recommend waiting a few minutes before digging in) and chewy boba bubbles. A festive treat indeed.

Have a sweet long weekend,

Soph

P.S. For those of you who follow me on Instagram and voted to read about Taiwanese food — worry not, I will post the recipe for the soft-boiled tea eggs in an upcoming edition of this newsletter. You’ll just have to keep on reading ;)