As I mentioned in the previous post, I stopped at Extraordinary Desserts by Balboa Park in San Diego. It has a very good reputation, and as someone who loves dessert, it’s nice to see a place succeed that specializes in it. So often restaurants just drop the ball on their dessert menu, opting for boring favorites – creme brulee, chocolate cake, icecream, and either a brownie or bread pudding. I’d love to see more variation there, like flavored panna cotta, fruit-based desserts, maybe meringues or spice cakes or gingerbread or poached pears with cream. There’s so much out there!

I got this chocolate streusel because I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.  Yes, that’s really all it takes to get something into my mouth. Novelty. I liked how it is an atypical dessert in general, because streusels are usually breakfast items.

As usual, it was topped with flowers, chocolate, a squirt of chocolate ganache, gold, and powdered sugar. That’s five toppings, six if you count the fact there were two different types of flowers – rose petals and a daisy. I wonder how much these accoutrements account for the price. I have to say, I wasn’t wild about this dessert. Streusel is dense and dry in general – it’s pastry, not cake. The chocolate insides were rich and moist, in contrast, but they were too one-note. It was just chocolate, no hint of anything interesting, like spices or fruit. It wasn’t very sweet, either, so it was just simply boring.

It’s a little unfair because this kind of dessert doesn’t fit my flavor profile at all. I know what I like – creamy textures, complexity, sweetness, novelty. This was novel in concept, but not novel in taste, and I really don’t like pastry that much. Croissants, turnovers, pie crust – I’m not a fan. The streusel didn’t really have a chance, so definitely take my review with a grain of salt.

Apologies, again, for the poor lighting. I had to use flash for these photos due to poor indoor lighting.

I complained in my last post about the use of gold leaf in the desserts. It was randomly smeared onto a pecan in the chocolate pecan tart. Here, they seem to have dropped it on a flower with no regard for where it stuck. Look, I don’t have a lot of room to talk because I’m not a great styler myself. My sole contribution to the display of this photo was the fork in cocoa powder, which I hacked together using a Swiss Miss packet.  It just seems so strange to me that you would introduce gold leaf, which instantly reeks of pretention, and throw it on a flower, on a dessert, with no care at all exhibited. It really reinforces the idea that it’s there just to look expensive, and I hate things like that. Don’t make it look expensive so it looks expensive and you can charge more. Make it high-quality.

On the fourth of July, we went to Ringwood Manor, a fantastic historic mansion in northeastern New Jersey. George Washington’s mapmaker lived there, so it was an important part of the Revolutionary War. I’ve posted non-food pictures of the Manor several times on my other photography site, including shots of dragonflies in the pond, the blacksmith hut, and the loom demonstration I saw on the Fourth.

But now on to the good part — the food. Ladies in period gowns were selling baked goods made from recipes originating in the 1800s. I believe most of them came from Amelia Simmon’s American Cookery, the very first American cookbook, written in 1796. They ate well back then. Certain things, like sugar, were quite expensive, but cake was still cake and therefore delicious.

214 years later, I would still eat this! I actually did not get a piece of it, though, because I got so many other things. Fun fact – the chocolate cake recipes of the time referenced “5 cent Hershey bars” in their ingredient listings.

This next treat is called a jumble. It’s a cake/biscuit spiced with anise seeds, caraway seeds, and coriander, then dusted with sugar. It was meant to keep on long journeys. The taste combination was strange; I’ve never eaten anything sweet that had caraway and coriander in it, that’s for sure.

This is Martha Washington’s Jumble recipe:
“Take a pound & a halfe of fine flowre & a pound of fine sugar, both searced & dried in an oven, 6 youlks, & 3 whites of eggs, 6 spoonfulls of sweet cream & as much rose water, fresh butter ye quantety of an egg. Mingle these together & make it into stiff paste. Work it a quarter of an hour then break it abroad, & put in as much annyseeds or carraway seeds as you shall think fit, & put in A little muske & ambergreece. roule them into rouls & make them in what forms you please. lay them on pie plates thin buttered, & prick them with holes all over. then bake them as you doe diet bread. If this quantety of eggs will not be enough to wet ye flour & sugar, put in 23 or 4 more, but no more cream, butter, not rosewater.”
–Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, transcribed by Karen Hess [Columbia University Press:New York] 1995 (p. 348)

This next spice cake is called Independence Cake. It was very tasty – most likely because it had one of my favorite things, brandy-soaked raisins.

“Twenty pounds flour, fifteen pounds sugar, ten pounds butter, four dozen eggs, one quart wine, one quart brandy, one ounce nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, mace, of each three ounces, two pounds citron, currants, and raisins, five pounds each, one quart yeast ; when baked, frost with loaf sugar ; dress with box and gold leaf.”

- Amelia Simmon’s American Cookery

These next two pictures feature Queen’s Cake. I think of them as rose-muffins. They were made with rose water, and I thought they had rose jelly in the center, but the recipe says there should be currants. There was definitely a dark, fruity center in these. I believe the topping is lemon zest. I liked these – they weren’t great but definitely as edible as any blueberry or apple cinnamon muffin you’d make at home. Rose water elevates them a little.

Here’s that mysterious dark center.

Not pictured is a ginger cookie they also sold, which was soft, spicy, and one of the best I’ve had. I dislike hard snickerdoodles, or ones that aren’t ginger-y enough. This hit the mark perfectly, and I was pleasantly surprised that the 90 degree heat hadn’t dried it out. I have a photo of the cookie, but it’s not that interesting, and this post is already too long.

Hope you learned something! If not, how about this: that “ambergreece” Martha Washington mentioned is actually a perfume-like substance found in the intestines of the sperm whale.

I recently went out to lunch with two awesome friends of mine, AL and LB. We were looking for somewhere a little unique to eat and ended up at AQ Kafe, a bakery and cafe around Columbus Circle. It calls itself a “Northern European” establishment, but its pastries are called by their Swedish names, and they sell meatballs, so I’m not sure who they think they are fooling. I’ll be doing a few posts on their tasty baked goods this week. This first one is on their cinnamon bun, or kanelbulle. It literally means cinnamon (kanel) bun (bulle). Those of you who know Romance languages will recognize kanel’s similarities to canela/cannelle, the Spanish, Italian, and French word for cinnamon.

Note the many ropes of pastry that went into this confection. It is like a rubber band ball, except delicious.  I tried to find a recipe for you, but it seems like everyone at home takes the easy way out and rolls their buns up like a pinwheel instead. (That sounds .. nevermind.)

The Swedish cinnamon bun is also notable for its use of cardamom, instead of or in addition to the cinnamon. I’ve found cardamom to be a rare addition to baked goods in America, but it is extremely popular in Sweden. If you’re not familiar,  cardamom is similar to cinnamon but with a bit of a lemony undertone. It’s not as spicy, either – there’s no ‘heat’ to it. It’s more like a cross between nutmeg and cinnamon.

As you’ve probably noticed, there is no icing on top of this bun, just pearl sugar. It’s not salt! I know this whole thing looks like a pretzel but it’s definitely not.

I selflessly took a bite to show you the interior. There was a lot of cinnamon goodness in there, clinging to every pastry rope. You could rip strips off it instead of chunks if you were inclined, but any way of eating it felt destructive. I felt a little guilty because it was so elegantly tied together.

Another sugar picture for the road. It’s not salt! Stop thinking that!

As a side note, I took these pictures on a white background to make them ‘cleaner’, but I think that makes them look too sterile. Let me know what you think.