I hope you’re hungry. I hope you have a sweet tooth. This is an extensive Tour of NYC Desserts, hitting all of the hot spots in the city!
If there is a popular NYC dessert, we found it and sampled it! There is such a great variety of NYC desserts, and our mission was to try as many of them as possible. Delicious photographs ahead!
A few years ago, I hit the streets of New York City with my sweet blogging friends Maria, Jenny and Amanda. We pounded the pavement looking for every bakery in the city, tasting many delicious treats along the way. The girls are in Alice’s Tea Cup, where we drooled over their much-talked-about scones.
Bouchon Bakery was one of our favorite places… we sampled a Ho Ho, Vanilla Macaron, Peanut Butter & Jelly Macaron, Homemade Oreo, Peanut Butter Cookie Sandwich, Chocolate Chunk Cookie and some kind of pastry. One of these delicious goodies was my favorite of the entire NYC trip… but you’ll have to scroll to the end of this post to find out which one it was!
Of course, we had to hit Magnolia Bakery on our tour of NYC desserts and check out the infamous cupcakes.
Here are the treats we sampled at Magnolia.
The cupcakes were quite good, but my very favorite was the Red Velvet Cheesecake- pretty much to-die-for.
We cruised through snowy Central Park. Here’s Jenny, Maria, me and Amanda.
I am SO not a big-city-girl, but it sure was pretty.
Levain Bakery was our next stop- another fun one!
And this is what happens when food bloggers visit a bakery!
The cookies at Levain are as big and thick as scones. Bobby Flay did a Throwdown here with their Chocolate Chunk- Walnut Cookie (and lost). We sampled that one, as well as this Chocolate- Peanut Butter Chip Cookie and Brioche with Cinnamon Butter. All very good!
Good thing we walked a lot… all of that sampling, you know?! We wandered into Buttercup Bake Shop and gazed at their hot pink glazed and rainbow-sprinkled donuts, but we were too sugar-dazed at that point to try anything there. Next we headed to Patsy’s for some pizza, and we met up with our dear blogging friend Maggy.
Here’s me with Maggy- isn’t she beautiful? Inside and out… Maggy is definitely one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. I’m a zillion years older than Maggy, but we click pretty well together.
Momofuku Milk Bar was our next stop. Here we tried compost cookies, crack pie, birthday cake truffles and cereal milk ice cream. All really interesting treats, but no real stand-outs for me there.
We did enjoy our time together upstairs in the Momofuku Lounge… girl gossip, blog gossip and just plain fun. Left to right: Susan, Jenny, Amanda, Maggy, me and Maria.
This is Gina and Jenny. Gina and I had talked for a couple of years on Twitter, and finally we met! She’s another one who is exactly as I expected her to be… so pretty and fun and completely real. I visit her Skinny Taste recipe quite often in my lifelong quest to be skinny. After all of these years, we’re now good friends.
New York got snowier and snowier… yet we still trudged through the city on our mission to find more bakeries!
We found Chocolate Chip Cookie Sandwiches at Billy’s Bakery. And Cinnamon Marshmallows at Three Tarts.
Lulu’s had Alfajores, Black & Whites and Raspberry-Filled Snickerdoodles. If I wasn’t so stuffed, I’d have tried their White Chocolate Dipped Red Velvet Twinkies too. Amanda found a rather decadent Double Chocolate Cupcake at Two Little Red Hens.
This was my very first time visiting Chelsea Market. It really is a must-see for food lovers- gourmet shops and bakeries of every kind.
We sampled the original Fat Witch Bakery brownie… which I thought was just ok.
We wandered into Jacques Torres, where Jenny picked up a hot chocolate.
Eleni’s was next… all kinds of cupcakes and cookies. I thought these were cute. There were frosted cookie samples out so we nibbled… and they just tasted like frosted cookies. SaraBeth’s is also in Chelsea Market– didn’t get anything there but everything looked delicious.
At Ruthy’s Bakery we ordered up a slice of New York Cheesecake. The cheesecake itself was amazing, but we wondered where the crust was. Why would they leave the crust off? Isn’t that the best part sometimes? And I just thought this Spaghetti & Meatball Cupcake was adorable.
Hope you enjoyed the tour of NYC desserts! All of that, and would you even believe that I lost two pounds that week?? Small tastes and daily hotel workouts were my secret… and a bit of city walking too.
What a fun recap! The bakeries are pretty amazing in NYC. It would be tough to decide on a winner with all of those beautiful treats!
Lori, thanks for sharing such a fun trip to NYC with us!! I had no idea Gina of Skinny Taste lived so close by. Would love to visit with you both for lunch some day. Love that photo of the cupcakes in Magnolia with the NYC cab in the background. The photo of you and Maggie is gorgeous!
After a couple of these recaps, I must get to Bouchon for that macaron!
Oh Lori! I have been reading everyone’s NY posts with such envy! I was invited to go on the trip but had prior plans that prevented me from coming. I have to live vicariously through all of you! 🙂
What a difficult job you girls had. You should have called me to help.
PS – My mouth is watering all over my keyboard. What gorgeous treats you sampled!
NYC, sweet treats & hanging out with other passionate food bloggers….would have been a dream come true! So lovely to read about a group of people making the most of this precious life. Thanks for sharing your tour highlights – I hope to visit some of the bakeries myself. It’s a long way from Australia, but my dream is to holiday in the USA one day, so will keep some of those bakeries in mind.
SUCH A BLAST!!!
Now that’s my kind of trip! I like to eat my way through every city I visit 🙂 I’ve gotten some of the cookies you tried on your trip from Levain, Torres and Bouchon before and loved them! I can’t wait until they open the Bouchon Bakery in LA, I’m going to be there every weekend! Now if they could just open a Levain bakery out here too…
OMG I am so jealous of your trip!!! It looks AWESOME!! Brave you are to trek out to NYC in that kind of cold! I have not been there in AGES, and it’s high time I do something like that!! Love your photos, esp the photos of everyone taking photos of the food… can’t take the blogger out of the tourist 🙂
What fun!!