Red Rooster

I stumbled across this place on my way across 125th street this weekend.  They have food and drinks but I got this. 

Oatmeal pies. Yum.  

Dough Girls

Over the weekend, Kathy and I took a little trip to western PA.  On the way, we stopped at this little restaurant called Dough Girls, where rumor has it they make the best cinnamon rolls ever. Not one to back away from such a claim, we had to see if the rumor was true. So I can tell you that the cinnamon rolls were good, and these had maple flavored frosting, but I've had better.

BUT the whoopie pies were out of this world. 

When we got there, I was asking about the flavors of their whoopie pies and the girl behind the counter said, "I don't know what you're talking about."  After I repeated my question, another woman working there piped up and told me the flavors.  The girl just looked at her weird, and the woman said, "She's asking about the gobs." 

We both just looked at each other, as if to say, "You call them WHAT?" 

Also in Philly....

Whoopie pies! Here's a pumpkin whoopie pie with chocolate filling from The Flying Monkey. I wasn't a huge fan of the chocolate filling but the pumpkin cake.... Delish!

Birthday cupcake report

Birthday morning, I woke up to presents and birthday cake! Since I obviously love cupcakes, Anne Lise made them the theme of the day (and that's so like her to have a theme). All of the things in this gift bag had cupcakes on them -- note pads, post-its, those silly rubber bracelets, paper clips, etc.


Then she gave me this cute little cupcake on a pedestal, where it belongs. It was her famous Norske skjokolade kake with raspberry filling. So delicious and so many memories eating this cake together.Unfortunately, sometimes you have to eat something besides cupcakes. Therefore, we went out to breakfast to a place recommended by Esther called Hash House a Go Go. Little did we know that when we ordered a dish, it was supposed to feed a family of four.

This is a dish that is a signature HH meal. It is like eggs benedict, but they do it all on top of a biscuit. This was Lise's breakfast. She made a valiant attempt to finish it.

Below was my meal, which was turkey & bacon hash over fried potatoes, with a side of scrambled eggs and a biscuit. In case you are wondering, biscuits are second only to cupcakes for me.

Next, we were off on a cupcake adventure. We looked online and found a few places. Here's one, called Eclipse Chocolate. They mostly have amazing looking chocolate, but most places have some version of cupcakes in addition to anything else they serve, and so does this place. We got three cupcakes--all yellow cake with chocolate ganache frosting. From left -- PB&J, salted dulce de leche, and in front, apricot/peach.

Below is the salted dulce du leche. mmmmmm.... the cake was so moist and the ganache so rich. Here are a few choices from a place called Babycakes. We got several from this place... from the left pina colada, red velvet, vanilla/vanilla, black forest, chocolate/vanilla, and black bottom. These were disappointing. All of them were kind of spongy, dry and tasteless. That didn't stop me from eating one the next day out of the refrigerator, and for some reason, they tasted better the second day.


Lest you think I was finished, two days later I got a package in the mail. Esther, knowing how much I love her friend's cakes, who is also now making whoopie pies, sent me 16 whoopie pies. SIXTEEN!! And they are good!!

Thanksgiving wrap-up

I went back to Ohio for Thanksgiving to see Val&Greg and the kiddos. We had lots of fun, lots of laughs, and, of course, lots of FOOD!

Thanksgiving dinner (we're a pretty informal family)

On Saturday, we went back to Pink Moon. Here are "The Buckeye", German chocolate and Carrot cupcakes.

And because that wasn't enough, we made Whoopie pies on Sunday night to finish off the weekend!

For his birthday, Greg got The Beatles: Rock Band, so I like to think we burned off some of those calories playing every night for a few hours.

My nephew is completely obsessed with The Beatles now. He says their names with a British accent and tries to give me a history lesson any chance he gets. "Here they are with long hair." He also has decided that he's going to be in a rock band when he grows up. It's pretty hilarious to hear a 6 year-old boy sing, "I want you, I want you so bad..." Actually, he's not supposed to do that one, but I didn't know until it was too late. I have to say, although I never really want to hear "Yellow Submarine" again, I quite enjoyed myself. (It totally beats Mario Kart, which was last year's game.) Of course, my nephew was a guitar hog, so I didn't get much of a chance to practice that, but I kind of liked the drums the best, anyway.

Now I just want to get them some Springsteen songs!

Giant Whoopies

Heidi went to LA to visit friends and sent me a picture of these ginormous whoopie pies that she saw at a local bakery. They are the size of a cake!

I wouldn't normally post something that I hadn't actually tried myself, but I couldn't get over these things. It almost makes me want to visit LA.

A whoopie cookie

After I posted the article about whoopie pies, I finally got around to reading the whole article. If you read all the way to page two, you read that Magnolia has a maple whoopie pie!! So, that was put on my agenda for Friday night. Here you can see (or maybe you can't) it's not really a whoopie pie, but two cookies with maple cream in between. Which is why when we told the guy behind the register that we had a whoopie pie, he kept calling it a whoopie cookie. We were so tempted by everything else in the place, that we decided to split a slice of cake, as well. Because it started to get super crowded in there, as it always does, and the staff started to freak out, as they always do, we quickly just chose one. I wanted to try the Hummingbird cake, but since Heidi has to ask 500 questions before she can settle on something and the staff were seriously not having it, I suggested the coconut cake, she agreed and that was that. But when he went to cut us a slice, he said there wasn't enough left for a whole slice... so they gave it to us for free! Perfect!

The verdict is that the whoopie cookie was really delicious. The cookies were perfect -- soft on the inside with a little bit of crispiness on the outside. The cream was really tasty, and I love maple. But I'm not sure I'd go out of my way for this again. If I want a whoopie pie, I'm going to go for a real one. But if you are going to Magnolia anyway, it's worth a try.

Whoopies in the news

I like to think I'm a little ahead of the dessert curve. After all, I have been eating cupcakes from Magnolia since at least 1999, which is when I moved to the city. Now whoopie pies, which I fell in love with in Maine last year, are apparently sweeping the nation, according to the New York Times.

(thanks for the article, Jill.)

Whoopie pies come to the Union Sq. Farmer's Market

... and I am in trouble!! The ones on the right are pumpkin with raisins. I love love love pumpkin whoopies, but with raisins? No danger there! The traditional chocolate ones were delish, although much smaller than the ones I had in New England in the spring/summer. (is that good or bad?)

Rhode Island

On Saturday, I drove up to Providence RI with friends Kathy and Lynn. On the way, we stopped in CT for lunch and this particular rest stop had a large dessert/pastry/baked goods display with... Whoopie Pies!! My response to that was to say, "Whoopie! I'm back in New England!" After hearing me praise the whoopie pie after my last trip to New England, Kathy and Lynn thought they would partake.


Once we got to RI, we started seeing vegetable stands off the side of the road and we decided to stop and get some fresh fruits and vegetables (macouns are in season, people!). We had our eye out for more, but then we saw this sign:

Lynn almost got into an accident when I yelled "Pull over!" but she did it anyway. I jumped out of the car and found a small table off the side of the road, with a cooler underneath containing whoopie pies, and this high-tech method of obtaining the payments.


They had pumpkin and original chocolate (pictured here), and I wanted one of each, but only had a few ones and a $20, and did not think the tackle box was going to make change for me. So I just got the pumpkin. When Kathy and Lynn heard that they had pumpkin flavor, they decided they, too, needed a second whoopie pie.


After that, we drove up to Newport and drove past the mansions but since we didn't have time to go into them, started making plans to return someday soon. Then we drove back to Providence for the FireWater art installation.

Here we are in Newport

Basking in the light of the fire in Providence

All kinds of pie

I spent the past few days driving through New England. We started in Connecticut where we picked up our car, drove through Vermont, stayed over night in New Hampshire, then it was on to Maine for two nights, then spent an afternoon in another New Hampshire town and finally ended up at my sister's place in Boston.


The first day, we stopped for lunch in Vermont at a restaurant that Heidi found on a website called roadfood.com. She's a bit of a food snob, so it wouldn't occur to her to just grab some McDonald's on the way. She found this restaurant that she figured we'd hit around lunchtime. We had sandwiches, mac and cheese and two kinds of pie -- three berry and walnut maple. We took the pie to go because we were so full. Once we got to the resort where we were staying, we realized this place was a little fancier than we thought, and that we were used to. But that did not stop Heidi from asking if we could turn the TV set to American Idol, bring our own pie into the restaurant to eat and order ice cream to go along with it. When I said I was too embarrassed to do it, she went back and forth, but finally said, "This is America. We should be able to eat our pie wherever we want." Although at first the servers seemed a little put out by us that we were (1) wearing jeans and (2) wanted to eat from the tavern menu instead of the dining room menu, they cheerfully obliged us.


The treat we discovered in abundance was the whoopie pie. We stopped at a gas station/convenience store somewhere along the way in Vermont. I saw these whoopie pies in the store, and just had to get one to eat along the way. I decided to try the maple flavor and it was goooooood! I have had whoopie pies before, but not as big (lots of cake, lots of cream) as the ones we found in New England and had never seen any variety in flavors other than the traditional chocolate. I had no idea that they are so plentiful. After googling it, I found that it is, indeed, something that can be found lots of places, but is attributed to New England and especially Maine. It turned out to be the thing to do in each town we went. In Portland, ME, we even had a whoopie pie cake. Luckily, they are much harder to find in NYC, so I won't be eating any more for a while. I'll just have to go back to cupcakes, but I'm going to try to abstain for a few weeks because I really overdid it the past two weeks.