Our Sweet Tour of New York City: Cookies, Cakes, Waffles and…mMmmMm Donuts

On our recent visit to NYC for the 2010 NYC Wine & Food Festival, we had some important BFS business to take care of…some serious long overdue research!

Ever since I started my pursuit of baking the most perfect (when it comes to cookies, there are various types of perfection…so yes, most perfect) chocolate chip cookies, I have asked my friends, co-workers, family members about places they like to go for cookies. To much frustration, some of them go like this:

So with a mental catalog of all the places I had to visit, I arrived in New York on cookie tour mission. Due to time restrictions and my general tangent behavior, the cookie tour morphed into a sweet tour including cakes, waffles and donuts…!!

Thursday night was one of those rare weatherless nights in New York City so we opted for some al fresco street food at The Madison Square Mrk’t. After a round of deliscious pizza, lasagne and too many sandwiches to name (or remember)...we moved on to business: DESSERTS!

There were two dessert vendors, one offering waffles, the other donuts. We couldn't decide, so our dear friend Borha got us BOTH! mMMmmm... Apple Cider Donuts and Belgium Waffles topped with Dulce de Leche. Now, only if I can figure out a way to translate these flavors into cookies…thoughts marinating, hopefully something will surface. Apple cider whoopee pies with a caramel crème do sound like an appropriate cookie sandwich for the fall-time.

Friday - Sunday was filled with festival activities...so I continued my sweet tour first thing Monday morning with brunch at Prune where I had the Dutch Style Pancake with pears. The dutch pancakes I was familiar with were puffy Yorkshire pudding-like pancakes, but the one below was basically a cake baked in a pan (rather than fried)…which I guess technically still qualifies as a pancake. =)

It was fluffy goodness with a touch of cornmeal (we think!)…but also time to move on to cookies. We only had time for one cookie to visit so we had to choose among a long list of places, including Momofuku Milk Bar, Levain, City Bakery, Fat Witch Bakery, Max Brenner, Ruby et Violette, Insomnia, Jacques Torres...being in the East Village already we chose Momofuku Milk Bar.

Momofuku Milk Bar offered six different types of cookies: compost, chocolate-chocolate, blueberry & cream, peanut butter, corn, corn-flake-marshmallow-chocolate chip. Looking at the interesting variety of cookies that Momofuku offered, I just wanted to go home a write and research new flavor combinations for Batch From Scratch. We ended up with the blueberry & creme and the corn-flake-marshmallow-chocolate chip cookie...oh, and cereal milk flavored soft serve ice cream.

They were delicious. Good texture, flavor, crumb...all around yummy. The blueberry & cream one was not as sweet as I expected, which is good but dangerous because you can inhale the entire cookie without even noticing. Do you see how the cookie breaks, you can just tell its moist! Can you see those little pockets of dense buttery goodness, those little mountains of decadence that form on top of the cream chips... now that's what I call beautiful! Note that those little mountains are the parts you want to pick off first...!!

We weren't able to try all the cookies that we wanted to, but there's always next time (hopefully before next year's NYC Wine & Food Festival).