Word: flourless
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This Can't Be Good. Magnolia Bakery, the beloved New York City cupcake creator has opened an outpost in Rockefeller Center - a five-minute walk from this travel reporter's desk. The bakery's famous pastel-colored buttercream-frosted cupcakes are made on premises, along with flourless chocolate cakes, brownies and muffins. This is a take-out joint, but you can eat your treats on a bench in Rock Center; if it's cold out, head down into the nearby Rockefeller Center concourse. There's an entrance in the building a few steps from Magnolia, at 1250 Sixth Avenue...
...dessert, you must order the Flourless Chocolate Torte ($5.50), spiced with cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, pepper, saffron, nutmeg and star anise, and accompanied by rich Valrhona chocolate sauce and dried fruit compote. The Crème Brulée ($5.50) is less enticing, too eggy, and not as creamy as it should be, with an incorrect proportion of custard to bruleed sugar. A dense thimbleful of Turkish Coffee ($2.00), afloat with whole pods of green cardamom, is a fine end to the meal...
...dessert cart! I hesitate to attempt a description, but, in the spirit of journalistic duty, I'll give it a shot. Nineteen tarts, pies and concoctions, including an absolutely sinful key lime and white chocolate pie, a deadly flourless chocolate cake, homemade banana ice cream and various sweet, fluffy extravaganzas, drizzled expertly with a homemade raspberry sauce. It was truly astounding...
Dessert consisted of a strawberry-lychee soup with rhubarb sorbet that was fruity and light, stopping just short of being too sweet. The second dessert was flourless almond/orange cake, crunchy and light, spiced by orange zest and whipped cream. Flourless cake is generally dense, rich, and chocolate, but this was none of the above, an ideal choice for Passover. In the end, the desserts, like the entrees, far outshone the appetizers...
...strong though uneccentric personality. As a baritone, Smith has drawn obvious comparisons to Billy Eckstine and Johnny Hartman. But whereas those singers can sometimes sound mesmerized by the sheer resonance of their own vocal cords, Smith has a more nimble sense of phrasing--he's rich yet light, the flourless chocolate cake of a Weight Watcher's dream. On the Art Blakey tune Moanin' he lets loose with a paradoxically graceful abandon that would make a silky shouter like Joe Williams proud...