Magnolia Bakery Mukbang 🧁✨
Watch me eat three types of dessert in one sitting, only you have to imagine it in your head because there is no footage.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we’ll take one of everything, please. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
(Frozen) banana pudding at Magnolia Bakery
Several locations — check online
I am a firm believer that for your birthday, you should plan something unpleasant to do. That way, you can get the birthday blues out of the way and remove the expectation to have a good time, which is a sure fire way to have a bad time. For my birthday, I got a head scan. Then I went to Magnolia Bakery with a good friend and bought one of everything I’ve always wanted to try off the menu: Hummingbird cupcakes, peanut butter icebox cake, cheesecake, and, of course, banana pudding. Magnolia is one of those rare New York icons that always has a line, even on a rainy Monday evening, but is truly worth the wait. (Also I just looked it up on Wikipedia and there’s 200 locations worldwide?!) It would be sacrilegious to try to judge the famous banana pudding, so instead, I will offer you a hot summer tip: Stick leftover pudding (if you have any!) in the freezer for a very indulgent, no-churn ice cream.
Vanilla cheesecake at Magnolia Bakery
Several locations — check online
For the past six months now, I’ve had a very strong and consistent craving for cheesecake. Unfortunately, cheesecake, like flaky pie crust, is one of my home baking nemeses. I just cannot churn out a good cheesecake at home, no matter how hard I try. It always just tastes like sweetened cream cheese, not the fluffy-dense slice of my dreams. Thankfully, Magnolia has the cutest line of cheesecakes behind the pastry case, and the vanilla is pretty much my platonic ideal of a cheesecake -- not only is it incredibly adorable, the perfect size between mini and medium, a slightly chonky mini, if you will (I love small desserts, but anything that’s too mini, like a miniature cupcake, just feels like it’s already over before it’s began), it’s topped with a wonderful dollop of sweetened whipped cream.
Peanut butter icebox cake at Magnolia Bakery
Several locations — check online
I am pretty sure this peanut butter icebox cake is really just a peanut butter cheesecake bar-- but I don’t hate the cute marketing. I love peanut butter but rarely eat peanut butter flavored things, preferring to go straight to the source (extra crunchy, please!). However, this bitch cannot resist a tiny peanut butter cup, and this icebox cake is covered in them, which is why I bought it. I honestly don’t know what makes an icebox cake an icebox cake -- I thought it had to be the little stack of cookies softened by whipped cream, which this is certainly not. However, I will not complain because this is a very rich and delicious little cheesecake, which is what I wanted deep down inside, anyways.
Dr-Cow coconut granola at Puerh Brooklyn Teashop
174 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (also available online).
In my mind I picture Dr-Cow (that’s hyphen cow to you, not Dr. Cow) to be the kinder, gentler cousin of Dr. Bronner. He’s still your hippie uncle, but the good doctor never learned to use ALL CAPS to shout about psychedelics, and peddles raw vegan cheese instead of hemp-scented castile soap. Unfortunately I’ve yet to try any of the vegan “dairy” products by Dr-Cow, but the coconut granola is so good, it’s worth a trek to the Puerh Brooklyn Teashop (which is a great field trip, anyways), where it’s stocked. This is no ordinary granola -- there’s zero fillers, like oats and corn syrup. It’s all salty-sweet coconut flakes and little specks of crunchy buckwheat with nuts and seeds. The price tag is high, but one jar lasts quite a while, and it’d make a really nice gift to bring to a friend you haven’t seen since 2019.
Strawberry spoon cake at home
Recipe by Jerelle Guy, via NYT Cooking (Google for recipe).
I picked up my very first CSA box (!!) this week, something I have been meaning to do for years. This now means I am cursed with about five pounds of lettuce (I do not enjoy vegetables that resist being stir fried), but also blessed with a tiny, misshapen box of little strawberries. Every time I walk past a green market in the summer I am tempted to drop six bucks on one of those little green pint boxes of local strawberries but I never give in, and now I finally have my chance. Locally grown strawberries are delicious but also delicate and soft-skinned and bruise easily, so after eating half the pint on day one, I used the remainder to bake this delightful strawberry spoon cake the next morning. This simple, homey cake, which is really more like a cobbler, is the perfect way to show off strawberries that are just a little past their prime, and wonderful for breakfast with a hot mug of milky coffee.
XOXO,
Soph
P.S. Do you want to be a Very Good Reader? Please consider a paid subscription, which includes a special monthly long form recipe.