Category Archives: Great Finds

Cupcake-itis

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Clockwise from back: Strawberry-filled vanilla, chocolate, peanut butter-filled chocolate, and marble cupcakes.

I blame this on Nate of the House of Annie blog.

After returning from my Los Angeles vacation, where I made the rounds of bakeries, I thought I was done with nibbling on cupcakes. At least for a little while.

But then Nate had to tell me that one of my favorite South Bay bakeries had started making cupcakes.

Darn him. Darn him.

So, of course, I had to try them.  Calories be damned.

Off I went to Sugar Butter Flour’s original location in Sunnyvale (there’s a second one in Campbell now, too). Last year when I was still writing for the San Jose Mercury News’ food section, I had picked Sugar Butter Flour’s pastry chef-partner, Irit Ishai, as one of the top pastry chefs in the South Bay. Consider her resume: Former pastry chef at Sent Sovi in Saratoga under then-Executive Chef David Kinch; former pastry chef of Kinch’s subsequent restaurant, Manresa in Los Gatos; and an apprentice at Fleur de Cocoa in Los Gatos, owned by Pastry Chef Pascal Janvier, whom I also singled out in that same story as a stellar pastry chef.

Sugar Butter Flour’s cupcakes are $3 each. I picked one of each available that day to cart home: a strawberry-filled vanilla cupcake, a marble cupcake topped with chocolate buttercream, a chocolate cupcake with a white squiggle a la Hostess, and a peanut butter-filled chocolate cupcake with peanut butter buttercream.

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Penzeys Spices to Open Its First Northern California Store

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Lucky Menlo Park will be the home of it, too.

Penzeys, whom foodies love for its vast array of spices, started as a store in Milwaukee, Wisc. in 1957. Over the years, it has become a mail-order phenomenon, selling everything from adobo seasoning to zatar. It now boasts 39 retail stores across the country, too.

Fliers are already being mailed to Peninsula residents about the new 771 Santa Cruz Ave. store that will open “soon.”

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A Dang Good Burger

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Burger nirvana

If a shrine could be built for a burger, fans of Father’s Office gastropubs in Santa Monica and Culver City would erect one to be sure.

Sang Yoon, a South-Korean-born chef who has worked with the likes of French culinary genius Joel Robuchon, turned his back on fine-dining to create these two casual, fun, hip pubs that serve gourmet bar food and 36 craft beers on tap. Smoked eel with poached egg and horseradish creme fraiche, anyone?

It is his “Office burger,”  though, that has got tongues wagging and teeth chomping for seconds. A $12 burger made of dry-aged strip steak, bleu cheese, arugula, and onions caramelized with a splash of sweet-tangy balsamic. It trounced other chefs’ creations in a “Today Show” cook-off. Esquire and Chowhound fanatics have labeled it the best around. Indeed, foodies have deemed it a “masterpiece” of burger-dom.

But the real question, of course, is what my hubby, aka Meat Boy, would think of it. He had been looking forward to sinking his teeth into one ever since we planned our recent Los Angeles trip.

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Cupcake Challenge, Part 2 — LA-Style

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In one corner, cupcakes from Joan's on Third.

It would be hard to do justice to the cupcake culture that’s risen in Los Angeles. Everywhere you turn, it seems like there’s a cupcake bakery or one about to open. And it would be doubly hard to do an all-out cupcake-off after one is already bursting at the seams from a lunch of bone marrow, and burrata pizza.

But my hubby and I gave it our best shot, even after such a filling lunch. We picked up five cupcakes total from two bakeries (priced at $3 to $4), then took them back to our hotel room to do our own taste-test.

First up, cupcakes from Joan’s on Third, a cute-as-a-button, family-owned, cafe-bakery that also sells gourmet food to-go, including chi-chi pasta sauces, cheeses galore, charcuterie, and roast chickens. We had high hopes for these cupcakes. They were beautiful to look at. We chose a Snickers bar-topped chocolate cupcake; a peanut butter-marshmallow chocolate cupcake; and a “Cloud,” a chocolate cupcake topped with a huge spiral beehive of chocolate-dipped marshmallow that looked like Marge Simpson’s head.

In the other corner, cupcakes from Sweet Lady Jane.

We also picked up two cupcakes from an old favorite, Sweet Lady Jane, known for its fabulous cakes. The downside to Sweet Lady Jane is that it doesn’t always have cupcakes. You just have to hit it at the right time and hope for the best. We lucked out that day, getting our hands on a Red Velvet and a chocolate cupcake.

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The Best Darn Gelato

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Gelato worth every single calorie

When Pulitizer-Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold recommends a place, smart foodies listen.

After all, not only can the man write (he is the only food writer to ever win journalism’s highest honor), but he has impeccable taste.

So when my hubby and I were in Los Angeles recently, we picked up a copy of LA Weekly, which Gold writes for. It happened to be its “Best of LA” issue, jam-packed with the very best food finds in this sprawling metropolis.

My eye caught Gold’s recommendation for “best gelato.” Bulgarini Gelato in Altadena. Gold describes this small, quirky gelato shop owned by the one and only Leo Bulgarini as “His gelati are labeled only in Italian, and he is not above correcting an 8-year-old on her faulty pronunciation of pistacchio or stracciatella. His standards are so famously strict that he’s been known to pull his delicious sorbetti from the menus of restaurants and the freezer cases of retailers that in one way or another failed to come up to his standards. A big photograph on the wall of his Altadena shop shows him making an obscene Italian gesture to a giant Sicilian ice cream plant….”

Gulp.

OK, so maybe I was a little afraid as I stepped through the doors. I took a deep breath, fearing it would be like the Soup Nazi episode of “Seinfeld.” I’d order incorrectly and be tossed out, denied a taste of gelato nirvana for all time.

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