Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

They say there's always room for dessert... We tried out a dessert place on St. Mark's Place called Spot Dessert Bar tonight, thanks to a swell Living Social deal and a glowing recommendation from Serious Eats: New York. Their menu was pretty extensive, covering savory and sweet food.  I was also really impressed that their menu's photos reflected what the real food looked like, and not just stock images.  Everything looked and sounded incredible.  Our Living Social deal covered $20 worth of goodies, and with macarons on the menu, we obviously knew we had to try those.  Dessert was the Yuzu Eskimo and five macarons. The Yuzu Eskimo was a beautiful, artfully arranged plate with fanned out slices of ice cream on top of a bed of crushed Oreo cookies.  On the side was a raspberry foam and a strawberry.  It looked almost too pretty to eat!  I imagine really fancy restaurants serve dessert on par with Spot Dessert Bar's, at least on plating design...

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, ...