The Deal Closer @ The Standard Grill

Square of Chocolate from the Standard Grill in NYC, under the High Line. This is not the dessert showcased in this blog post; I thought it best to leave that as a surprise.


At the Standard Grill, executive pastry chef, Frederick Aquino, has loosened chocolate cake's corset to create a fun and flirty chocolate burlesque called the Deal Closer. A king's portion of fluffy chocolate mousse covered with generous mounds of unsweetened whipped cream and sprinkled with thick chocolate shavings, arrives in a large glass kitchen bowl with two rubber spatulas. One taste and I said to myself about Chef Aquino, I like this man's joie de vivre!

First there's the eye-popping excitement of a big bowl of chocolate mousse. And spatulas, not spoons—what more do you need? Beyond the feast for the eyes, there's the titillating sensation of delving deep into a rugged heap of whipped cream followed next by billowy mousse, and then, fathoms below, a rich bed of chocolate cake. If you decide to tackle this mountain of mousse with a metal spoon, as I did, you can add to your sensory enjoyments, the muffled, hollow, tapping sound of the spoon hitting the bottom of the glass bowl somewhere beneath all that mousse.

As mentioned, the whipped cream is unsweetened, which is brilliant because given the portions too much sugar would really slow you down. The mousse is sufficiently chocolatey with little sprinkles of salt to keep things from getting monotonous. The chocolate cake is actually the most rewarding part of this whole extravaganza, it's like the rich soil you've been mining through all this mousse for.

Perfect Chocolate Cake @ The Chocolate Room

While on a wild-goose chase for a particular brand of dirt cheap wine (see next week's post), in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I came to a screeching halt at a discreet little cafe called The Chocolate Room. The dessert-dedicated menu described a trove of quintessential chocolate delights. It's a compilation of chocolate's best hits—chocolate layer cake, a brownie Sundae and chocolate pudding—together in one little darling of a cafe. The Chocolate Room even has daily specials and homemade ice cream. Menu in hand, I looked forward to someday going inside.

This past Sunday, I returned with a friend and a veni, vidi, vici spirit, to sit and sample the three-layer chocolate cake:



Here it is in the photo above: a neat slice of cake, with the exception of the front corner which I dug into before remembering to photograph it first. As you can see, the pale chocolate frosting has a subtle gloss and contrasts nicely with the dark, reddish brown cake. The texture is firm but moist. As for the taste, hang on to your laptop, it's pure chocolate splendor!

There's only one way to describe a chocolate layer cake with all the right parts—perfect! And this is just one of many dazzling options available at The Chocolate Room to satisfy your hunger for chocolate.

Gluten Free, Flavor Full

Fear no more the search for gluten-free cakes and cupcakes for friends and loved-ones with a gluten-intolerance. It's places like this, Tu-lu's gluten-free bakery, aka Tully's Bakery, in the East Village, that motivate food enthusiasts like me to start a blog.

Though I am not one of the 1 in 133 Americans affected by Celiac disease, I do love cupcakes; this is essentially why I'm writing about Tu-lu's, where I recently purchased two large cupcakes.

Behold:




Chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting: First off, you can smell the chocolate when you cut/bite into it. The cake itself is dense with a natural, traditional chocolate flavor. The chocolate frosting is stupendous: intense, bold, yummy. You almost want to search for a hint of brandy in there because the flavor is so intensely savory, but the only intoxicating element in this frosting is the divine taste of rich cocoa. It's also so light that it melts in your mouth.

Vanilla cupcake with vanilla cream-cheese frosting: The cake has a sturdy yet moist texture and a mild vanilla flavor that doesn't seek the limelight, it's more like the wafer cone that holds the frozen custard, which in this case is a robust vanilla frosting with a splendiferous cream-cheese punch.

As soon as I knew it, my glass of milk was empty and I was staring down at a plate of gluten-free crumbs. But in spite of having just devoured two cupcakes, I didn't feel heavy or weighed down. It made me wonder if maybe I have a sensitivity to gluten? I don't, but it's to the baker's credit that these festive treats make you ponder the presence of gluten in your diet as something potentially deleterious to your health rather than other GF baked goods that simply leave you feeling sorry for those who can't eat gluten.

So who's responsible? Quality, as I discover time and time again, is no accident, but the result of training, effort, skill, passion and ability. Owner/baker, Tully, originally from Memphis, Tennessee, studied at Le Cordon Bleu and then moved here to NYC, where she interned at Gramercy Tavern. You can read her story on her Web site which basically describes how she was diagnosed as gluten intolerant and that this twist of fate led her on a search for delicious gluten-free cakes and cookies. There were none to be found, so she strove to create a recipe of her own, ultimately arriving at a winning combination of rice flour, potato flour and tapioca flour along with natural and organic ingredients. What an amazing story of turning trial into triumph, Tully's Bakery is dharma at its most delicious.