Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

If you recall, dear reader, I took a hiatus from coffee last year, so my drink of choice became tea, all day, errday.  We happened upon this amazing tea shop in Soho called Harney & Sons that I am still in love with.  Even though the store is kind of small, the interior is cavernous and the walls are lined with black and gold boxes of every tea imaginable.  There is a bar where you can get free tea samples: they brew tea leaves to a kitchen timer (3-5 minutes, depending on what you're sampling) and pour it into cute little ceramic bowls.  They also sell tea accessories: intricate teapots, hand lotion scented like Earl Grey, tea towels, and mugs. The best part of the whole store is the little tea parlor all the way in the back.  Soft lighting illuminates the pale lavender walls and the furniture is accented with dark brown wood-y colors.  Besides having a romantic ambiance, the things they serve are delicious. We've frequented Harney & Son...

Yep, that's a unicorn For everyone who's been living under a rock for the past year or so... There's this ice-cream-truck-turned-store called Big Gay Ice Cream near Alphabet City.  And their ice cream is to-die-for.  And their shop is really cute!  If you're into eclectic unicorn murals and rainbow colors.  But word of warning: the fact that their store is right next to Butter Lane Cupcakes spells trouble (i.e. sugar overload) for the wandering foodie. The first time we came here was to use up a Groupon deal.  It was a horrendously rainy fall day last year and I was kind of annoyed at having to trek all the way over a bunch of avenues to get to the shop.  And then, when we arrived, the guy said the air conditioner was broken so it might mess with the quality or solidity (is that a word?) of the ice cream.  No matter, ice cream is ice cream and I've been known to straight up drink the bottom of a bowl of of ice-cream-melt.  That time,...

A couple of posts back, I mentioned that we're very much macaron people.  Well, turns out we're very much cupcake people as well.  In fact, our ideal dessert would probably be a macaron-topped cupcake. Stand Mixer Over the summer (wow, it's fall already?!) we participated in a cupcake baking lesson at Butter Lane in the East Village.  It was a school event, so we ended up paying $10 for something that would otherwise cost $60 or so.  We arrived at the hole-in-the-wall bakery and its adjacent kitchen.  An instructor split us into groups and introduced us to the things we'd be making: chocolate, vanilla, and banana cupcakes, and cream cheese, vanilla, and chocolate frosting. We settled down in front of these super-cool KitchenAid stand mixers and got to baking. Our group made banana cupcakes, which sounded like they'd be muffins.  We sheepishly followed the instructions and dumped ingredients carefully into the mixer.  A bunch of stirring, ...