By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
When times are tough, we still need to keep up our spirits. What better way than with a sugary pick-me-up? So we here at JTNews went out and found some yummy treats: Chocolates, candies, pastries — and lots and lots of cupcakes. In the course of a week, we tasted enough to put any diabetic into a coma.
Here’s what we found, and here’s where you can get ‘em:
We’ll start with chocolate. On the top of Queen Anne, Chocolopolis (1527 Queen Anne Ave. N, www.chocolopolis.com) proprietor Lauren Adler has, for the past year, been importing fine chocolate from 20 countries as well as making her own. She dropped off a few of the house specialties.
“The chocolate’s nice and smooth,” said taster Lynn of the milk chocolate-dipped dried apricot. Its more bitter partner in crime, the dark chocolate apricot, kept the fruit from overpowering the entire treat with sweetness, I thought.
We also tasted some very rich, very tasty truffles with chocolate sourced from Madasgascar and Venezuela. “Kind of cocoa-y, kind of creamy. Smooth and rich,” said taster Stacy of the Madagascar truffle.
Leyna thought the Venezuela version had a “nice bittersweet taste to it, not overly sweet,” while Becky found a bit more bitter than its Madagascar cousin.
The Chocolopolis winner, however, was the black mission fig filled with an anise-infused ganache and dipped in a dark chocolate. Wow!
The sweetness that came from the fig matched perfectly with the chocolate for a nice bitter-sweet balance. Stacy noted she liked “the crunchiness of the fig and the spiciness of the anise.”
For a fun diversion, Leyna said the gigantic super-spongy chocolate-covered marshmallows “satisfies my desire to bite into something fluffy that’s covered with chocolate.”
Stacy and I both loved the lightness of the marshmallows.
Also new to the sweets business is Deanne Emmons, who runs Wink Cupcakes from her dining room table (206-856-1600 or www.winkcupcakes.com), where she takes orders for pickup from her Queen Anne commercial kitchen — or she delivers!
The ebullient Emmons dropped off containers filled with regular-sized and mini cupcakes, including a couple decorated with a blue and white Magen David.
With the proliferation of cupcakes in this town, it’s interesting to see how some shops can master the cake part while the frosting is clearly the strong suit of others. With Wink, she’s got her cake down pat. That was apparent with the red velvet and the carrot cake, both of which were moist and yummy. The coconut-flavored cupcake was solid as well, I thought.
The vanilla? It was, well, vanilla.
“As vanilla frostings go, can’t beat that,” Karen, whose palate lends itself to the more simple, said.
“It’s just plain, simple, good vanilla,” agreed Mike.
Lynn found Wink’s lemon to be very lemony (appropriate), though the frosting was jarringly yellow.
Wink’s most interesting (and very popular, we’re told) was the peanut butter.
“It’s really peanut buttery,” Leyna said. “I really like that. That’s rich.”
It was heavy on the peanut butter, I noted, which is a good thing. I liked the infused creaminess on the inside as well.
Where for many of us cupcakes satisfy that nostalgia of being a kid (or, if we’re kids, we just plain like cupcakes), some places have turned the old party treat into a dessert you’d want to eat on a night out. Enter Fremont’s 35th Street Bistro (709 N 35th St., 206-547-9850), which brought us three to choose from: Tiramisu with a butter cream frosting; carrot pineapple with an orange cream cheese icing; and lemon coconut with lemon cream filling and icing. I’m salivating just writing this!
Taster Zach noted how the tiramisu’s roles were reversed: The cake was chocolate and the icing spiced and espresso.
“I don’t normally like tiramisu, but this is good,” he said.
Karen was less restrained in her review:
“Holy cow!” she exclaimed. “This is the yummiest frosting. I would eat that all day!”
But the others fared just as deliciously.
“Oh my gosh, that cake is yummy,” said Stacy. “I’m in love with that carrot cake. It’s bright. It’s refreshing.”
The carrot cake was my favorite of nearly all the treats as well. Zach quite enjoyed it.
“The orange works really well with the carrot cake,” he said. “It’s delicious.”
Lynn loved the lemon.
“Mmm…mmmm…That’s good,” she gushed.
“Very lemony. I like that one,” said Becky.
Karen would have been happy to spread the lemon frosting on toast.
We also tried 35th Street’s vanilla bean cheesecake, a.k.a. Mom’s Cheesecake. All I have to say about it is if my mom could have baked cheesecakes like this, I would weigh about 100 pounds more than I do now. It was a light and fluffy consistency, not too dense like cheesecakes often can be, and the flavor was nearly perfect.
Susan expressed the same sentiments for the pecan bread pudding with apple brandy caramel.
“I’d make a special trip to that place just for that,” she said. “That’s the best thing I tasted.”
Becky thought it tasted like homemade while all Stacy could manage was, “Oh my God, that’s good!”
As if dessert weren’t enough, 35th St. Bistro also has a selection of handmade truffles. “Very nice,” said Leyna of their dark chocolate chamomile truffle. “Nice flavor, not too overpowering, a little citrusy.”
Karen really liked the dark chocolate Earl Grey: “Not too Earl Grey,” she said. “This has an aftertaste of earl grey. That’s really yummy and the chocolate’s really good.”
We really wanted to taste the seasonal blueberry-peach Flipside baked by High 5 Pie (www.high5pie.com, from Fuel Coffee, three locations north of downtown Seattle). But our bookkeeper Louise, who organizes bike rides to go past Fuel so she can eat them, stole it. We’ll have to take her word that it was absolutely delicious.
With the Flipside, High 5 has struck upon an interesting idea that Gen-Xers and younger can identify with: Take those disgusting gloppy (but vexingly delicious) single-serving hand-holdable pies, like the kind sealed in wax paper and sold on those wire racks at your neighborhood convenience store, and make them into something good with fresh ingredients.
Fuel employee Cat brought us two others, apple and mixed berry, which we actually did get to taste.
“The guts are good because the apple’s not sweet,” said Lynn, who found it to be immensely flavorful. “I like the crust.”
I thought so, too. “The crust has a nice flakiness, and the apple’s nice and tart,” I declared. But then I tried the berry.
“Delicious!” I said. “The berries are just tart enough to keep the crust from oversweetening the pie.”
“I’d definitely buy that,” Becky said. “It’s crisp, and you can taste the flavor of the berry.”
Cat also brought us High 5 Fries, baked dough covered with cinnamon sugar which we all found delicious (and packaged in a paper sleeve like at your local burger joint), and an apple crisp served in its own little mason jar.
“Mmm…That’s really good,” Karen said.
“Nice chunks of apple, and it’s super cute that it’s in this little jar,” Leyna said.
The full pie got the same reviews. Except, of course, the jar.
What’s dessert without a little flare — something provided for us when Canlis (2576 Aurora Ave. N, 206-283-3313 — like we needed to tell you that) sent over pastry sous chef Sarah Benner-Kenagy with their blueberry and corn panna cotta, topped with a blueberry ice cream.
“Refreshing,” said Becky.
“And so beautiful,” added Stacy. “Very elegant. Exactly what you think when you think of Canlis — a layer of berry, base panna cotta, cookie crumble, blueberry ice cream. It reminds me of spring.”
“We don’t want to have anyone leave feeling weighed down,” Benner-Kenagy, who noted the dessert will be featured on its summer dessert menu, told us. “It’s supposed to be a light way to finish up.”
We finished up with some packaged treats. Kids Korner at Southcenter Mall, (kidsatthemall.com, 206-248-6800), brought us more Jelly Belly jellybeans than you can grow a beanstalk with. We got several flavor groupings of their dozens of choices — all of them kosher, it should be noted — including Spring Mix, Fruit Bowl, Ice Cream Cone, sugar free and Bean Boozled (containing flavors like Booger, Barf, Earwax and Moldy Cheese, which we let people with 12-year-old sons take home for review). We all know what they taste like, but why is I can’t stop eating them?
Local cherry and nut purveyors Chukar Cherries also sent their dried cherry caramel corn — “It is good, and you just can’t eat one kernel,” Becky declared — as well as a sample box with several chocolate covered goodies, again all kosher. I was a fan of the amaretto chocolate cherry, while Leyna preferred the white-chocolate covered blueberries. Stacy declared the Pumpkin spice hazelnut her favorite: “Oh, that’s delicious!” she said. “I love this!”
As did we, judging from the sugar-induced smiles on all of our faces this past week.