Spring has officially arrived in NYC, as April showers are hopefully leading way to a plethora of May flowers to continue what seems to be the most beautiful flowers already blossoming. I don’t know if it’s quarantine brain or what, but spring seems extra lovely this year. I’m almost ready to start leaving my winter escape and visit the dozen or so bakeries on my to-do list, so get ready for some freshly reported bun action coming your way soon.
This week we’re covering some ground, going from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Britain (kind of)! Let’s get rolling.
Bourke Street Bakery
Just north of Madison Square Park, in an area called “NoMad” because marketing, lies the new-ish Bourke Street Bakery. An NYC outpost of a small family of Australian bakeries, they aim to bring the best and most delicious from down under to…up over?
I visited for the first time about a year ago, and again last week. The above photo was their early-COVID setup where you just ordered at the door, now you can go fully inside both of those doors to place your order. Progress!
Their menu consists of a variety of breads, buns, sweet and savory pastries, sandwiches, coffee, teas, and a small grocery selection. Literally everything I tried was delicious, but especially so was the cinnamon bun which surprisingly is rolled clockwise like every other cinnamon roll I’ve ever had originating in the northern hemisphere. 🤔🤔🤔
They call it a cinnamon bun, but it's so much more. The first thing you notice before diving in are the layers upon layers of dough. It's not just the layers rolled into themselves - the dough is made up of many tiny, tiny layers of croissant dough that give the bun a nice crispy outside and a gooey buttery inside. Once you bite into it, the buttery texture of the dough comes at you from the cinnamon filling as well, which has a nice mild sweetness. The filling is omnipresent - visually almost overflowing, but just the right ratio once you get into it. There's no frosting or glaze, but frankly that might be too much.
I have also tried their raspberry custard tart, bacon/cheese/scallion quiche, and pork and fennel sausage roll and can confirm everything is the most delicious. It’s a great stop if you’re in the neighborhood, but if not you can get nationwide delivery through GoldBelly.
Blue Sky Bakery
Keeping up with the BSB theme (my wildest bun dreams would be the Backstreet Boys baking buns) we go next to Blue Sky Bakery, an 18-year-old bakery near Barclay’s known for their incredible and unique muffin combinations like cranberry/mango, apple/walnut/pumpkin, or raspberry/chocolate/zucchini. They also make a darn good cinnamon roll.
The dough comes a bit airy and chewy, almost like a doughnut more so than your traditional cinnamon roll dough. The cinnamon filling is thick and gooey in parts, and provides a nice strong base in just the right ratios. To top it off, you can get it with a lemon frosting (of the traditional sugar variety) that adds a nice flavor and balance.
Come for the muffins, stay for the muffins and the cinnamon rolls, you won’t be disappointed.
Small Bites
April Cronut
New month, new Cronut drop, and April’s is Apricot Caramelia: homemade apricot jam and creamy Valrhona Caramelia (caramelized milk chocolate) ganache.
Gotta be honest, after the last two months of absolute bangers I knew it was only a matter of time before Chef Dominique released something more lackluster and this is it! From the outside it looks very pretty, with the apricot filling having a nice glow to it, but on the inside it tastes kinda boring. The apricot jam isn't very flavorful (although it might be possible that it’s me because I haven’t had an apricot in probably several years for no real reason), and the caramelia milk chocolate just doesn't add enough to make interesting. Both are too subtle to add anything distinct, unlike last month’s rhubarb or February’s green tea notes.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a cronut so the baseline here is pretty good, but this one is not so notable.
The Computers Are Coming For Your Recipes
In what is surely the first salvo on our road to a techno-capitalist hell, Mars (the candy company) is running a competition pitting a Google AI against a champion from the Great British Bake Off for the best recipe using a Malteser (basically a British Whopper).
Sara Robinson, amateur baker and Google Cloud developer advocate, created a machine learning model that generated recipes, which she then took one and added a Marmite-infused buttercream frosting after Google Trends identified that "Is Marmite sweet or savory" was a top search related to "sweet and salty." Peter Sawkins, 2020’s GBBO champ, on the other hand, added soy sauce to a recipe he adapted from one of his mother's creations.
You can download both recipes after visiting Mars’ website, https://BakeAgainstTheMachine.co.uk/, vomiting because of that dumb dumb dumb URL, and giving up a bunch of consumer preferences they can use in product development.
Is it worth it??????????? luv 2 b a consumer
In case the premise wasn’t dystopian enough, here are some lovely quotes from the AdWeek article about it:
“We saw this opportunity as a way to partner with a storied and innovative company like Mars and also a chance to showcase the magic that can happen when AI and humans work together,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said.
“Baking against the machine is a fun challenge. Not many people can say they’ve baked head-to-head against a Google Cloud AI,” Sawkins said in a statement.
Those are real quotes by real humans, not the baking AI. We’re doomed.
🤖☠️
On that lovely note, see you next Tuesday bun buddies!
"Marmite-infused buttercream frosting" should be the only thing we need to ditch AI recipe-generation experiments for good.
The rhubarb cronut was one of the best things i've eaten, but I thought the apricot had punch (but agree that whatever the creamy part was supposed to be was NOT coming through). I'm a big blue sky bakery fan so I can't wait to try that bun!