Momofuku Milk Bar, New York, NY

In my mind, I've had an ever-expanding bucket list of restaurants and products I've been dying to try or purchase. It spans from the 500 bottle EuroCave, complete with a 30 year Donnhoff and Yquem vertical for my tasting, to a dinner for two at wd-50 or French Laundry to a MetroKane Rabbit. One of the more attainable goals on my list was to check out David Chang's Momofuku Milk Bar, one of five of his restaurants around New York City. Milk Bar is most known for its rotating selection of unusually flavored soft serve ice creams, the skill of its founding pastry chef, Christina Tosi, and David Chang's hatred of bloggers. I was hoping that Milk Bar would impress me so that I would not end up on this seemingly persnickety shit list. Unfortunately, I was not dazzled by the hype.

Tucked cozily into the front of Ma Peche, customers must navigate like lab hamsters through the walls of low-lit pastries and chalkboard-written specials to find their lunch, but those looking for Milk Bar will find the decor and layout fairly easy to understand. Specialties include the Compost Cookie and Crack Pie, which former addicts will be pleased to know, does not contain actual crack, and the cereal milk milkshake. We tried all three, plus a pack of cake truffles and a few more cookies.

The best treat of the day was undoubtedly the cereal milk milkshake, and not simply because we were parched from the heat and screeches of teenage girls at Prada for the first time. While $6 buys you a squat, small cup and the promise of organic whole milk, the result is incredibly refreshing and not too sweet. The cereal milk manifests itself in a slurry of Corn Flakes and gelatin, strained out into a smooth milk and frozen. The result is a malty, neutral flavor with a cool, smooth texture that didn't require the fellation of the straw to extract the goods. On a hot day, it was perfectly sweet with no sugar high and eventual crash.

I expected the cake truffles to be luscious, and they were. The pistachio truffle was well prepared with large chunks of pistachio nuts, a moist texture, and a nice hint of lemon zest in the white chocolate coating. It was slightly saccharine on the way down, but I chalked it up to the frosting glaze.

Next, we tried the cookies. Of the five cookies offered on the menu, we sampled three. After tasting those, I did not regret passing on the other two. The first selection, the corn cookie, seemed like it would be a pleasant follow-up to the neutrality of the milkshake. The vegetal flavors were well incorporated into the composition of the cookie. It tasted like an ear of fresh corn with butter and salt, but its excessive sweetness and flaccid break literally left a bad taste in my mouth. The texture was especially noticeable as a result of its flat, pancake shape. I found it disorienting to have such a light, fresh flavor combined with such a heavy mouthfeel. It had a texture absolutely saturated with oil, to the point where it made an audibly gooey squelch with each bite, and there was too much sugar to compliment the Willy Wonka-esque combination of vegetable and dessert. The texture was uniform with no corn pieces or salt crystals, and in the glow of natural light, the oil seeped out and glistened on our fingers.

This was not an aberration from the norm at Milk Bar. This super-sweet, unctuous quality was present in each dessert we tried, including the infamous Crack Pie. We wanted the Crack Pie to be our ironic saving grace, our narcotic Jesus in a world of greasy slickness, but it fell short of its name's promise. (If I weren't committed to keeping this website classy, I'd comment that I could have stayed home and eaten better crack pie free of charge).

The blueberry and cream cookie came across as a slightly-luxe version of the cloying $4 per dozen supermarket cookie. There was nothing outstanding about it that made me want to eat more, or frankly, eat it at all. The compost cookie had a uniform crunch with little balance between salty and sweet. The chunks of whole pretzels and nuts were reduced to a fine grain and the flavor was predominantly nutty and chocolatey.

Trying Milk Bar as a David Chang test-run doesn't make me want to pony up for a full dinner, especially considering the sketchy, pretentious reservation system and ban on photography. Badass doesn't have to mean bad-tempered, and in this case, Chang's "do it or shut the fuck up" method comes across in the mediocrity of the cuisine.

Euforia Thousand Layer Spice Cakes

It's no secret that I'm addicted to strange products. Weird flavors of chocolate or the latest frozen pizza flavor of the month has me salivating and panting at the freezer door. But sometimes a product comes along and is so striking in its simplicity and minimal presentation that I am forced to revisit my perspective on foods and whether there is a time and a place for exoticism or whether it is to be generously doled out.
While I'd love to say that the thousand layer cakes by Euforia could be more appetizing with a light dusting of cocoa-chipotle powder, a bacon and salsa verde infusion, or a slather of cream cheese and red wine frosting, the unadulterated truth is that they are phenomenal and perfect just the way they are. These are cakes that are beautiful on the inside. But unlike the fallacies your mother told you as a child, you zaftig beast, this is one hundred percent true and accurate.
The layers of the cakes meld into one smooth, textured bite, each mouthful buttery yet light, tasting of a pound cake with nicer ingredients. There's a subtle nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar flavor, but no one spice came out ahead of the others and blended together wonderfully. The cakes are extremely moist, and the flavor is the most familiar taste you've never had. I say this because each bite is never alien in form, but somehow better than the snack cakes and commercial baked goods I certainly grew up with as a child. There's a delicacy to these that is clearly carefully crafted.
God, flavors like this just drive me bananas. Every time I think something I have is good enough, something better comes along. Knowing that these exist in the world, with their six ingredients and petite, soft forms, will forever drive me from the lands of snack cakes and zanily frosted cookies. With cakes like these, less is more, ingredient wise. The only time that doesn't apply will be when you're eating them by the boxful.

Kika's Treats Dark Chocolate Brazilian Honey Cakes

Whenever I'm reminded of anything reminiscent of elementary school, my thoughts inevitably turn to school lunches and the intense bartering inside "the system." Man, there were more transactions in one table of Tisko Elementary than on Wall Street. Doritos flew and pretzels and raisins went untouched for the most part, but the real stars of lunchtime were the snack cakes. If you were that one lucky kid whose mom bought Little Debbie or Hostess, you had an entire cadre of food or even money at your disposal. Kids fought with their bare hands for snack cakes.These days I like to think I'm above strangling someone for an Oatmeal Creme Pie. After all, I'm not in prison, and somehow the novelty of eating a snack cake dissipated once I discovered that they were sold in packs of twelve for three bucks and that they were, for the most part, pretty commonplace. I haven't had one in ages due to my nearly unlimited supply of better, cheap as free foods, one of those being Kika's Treats. First Tracks alerted me to these and picked up a few packs, noting that they won the award of best cookies in SF Weekly in 2009 and gave them to me to test out.Brazilian honey cake, or pão de mel, is a confection I don't have much experience with, but after doing a little preliminary research, is similar in texture to a lebkuchen and is generally eaten for breakfast or as a snack due to its dense structure and restrained sweetness. Cover it in chocolate and you've got an instant hit. In this case, it brought me right back to my childhood, but with better snacks! Eating these is like eating a snack cake for an upscale adult audience. It's fluffy with a good structure, so it isn't prone to falling apart. The cake to chocolate ratio is perfect. The cake is flavored with a heady, aromatic mix of spices, the clove and cinnamon persistent without being overwhelming. The honey also brings a comforting richness to the cake. It brings back nostalgia with none of the hydrogenated guilt that comes with the Hostess territory. Keepitcoming and I were so smitten with these that we talked about them for most of yesterday afternoon and well into today. They were perfect representations of a better take on an old classic.

A Trifle for Keepitcoming Love's Birthday

Tonight was Keepitcoming Love's 30th birthday, and to celebrate, I put the finishing touches on the birthday trifle I'd been slowly assembling this week. When I asked Keepitcoming what she wanted for her birthday cake, she asked for something boozy, mushy, floral, and containing berries. With a little creative research, I found a trifle on the blog Cream Puffs in Venice, made with lavender loaves, pastry cream, and macerated strawberries.It sounded good. But it needed to be extreme. So I amped it up a little with my own take on trifle. Luckily, we had a butt-ton of snow days this week. Day one, I baked the lavender loaves. It was an easy recipe with quite a few eggs, and with a little added orange zest and vanilla, turned out to make a delicious sponge cake. Very dense. I made this ahead of time because I had to let it sit. The more stale it is, the better it is for absorbing liquids and maintaining its shape. I also made the simple syrup for the cake. I wanted to have something to boost the floral notes in the trifle, so Keepitcoming and I made a lavender, honey, and rosewater syrup to soak the cake in.On day two, the pastry cream was made. This was an especially daunting task as I'd never made pastry cream before. Keepitcoming claimed she'd made it but couldn't tell me anything about when or why she did. I think she dreamed about it. Nevertheless, this was easier than I thought and made me even cockier about cooking than before. To make the cream even more unctuous, I added a few tablespoons of Chambord and it gave it a really custardy and fruity flavor.That night, we cut up and macerated the strawberries with a little Grand Marnier. They were really frothy and boozy and chilled overnight. In the morning, I assembled the trifle with layers of each component, and a topping of fresh whipped cream with a heart of raspberries and preserves. And that was it! It was a wonderful birthday (made even more wonderful with pasta carbonara and a 1981 Vina Bosconia) and I was glad to have had the opportunity to share it with her.For the basic gist of this recipe, check out this website: she didn't post the entire thing, so my ratios were off and I had to make some quick changes, but it's relatively easy to figure out from the photos alone.

Southport Brewing Company, Branford, CT

Keepitcoming and I are back on my home turf for a brief spell and decided to meet up with Swagger for an ALL BLOGGER, ALL EXCLUSIVE POWER DINNER. Actually, it was just a regular dinner, albeit baller as hell, and we didn't talk about blogging.

Our original plans to go to Caseus fell through, due to a disorganized staff, and after enduring that degree of pretension, we all needed a drink. Off we went to SBC. A local favorite in Branford, SBC is standard bar fare with a few exciting twists and an impressive selection of house brewed beers.We were all in the mood for sandwiches and burgers, as it was a cold and dreary night, and started off the meal with the slightly lewd "sticky" calamari. This was really perfect. A giant platter of squid rings with a few tentacles thrown in for good measure, all coated with a sticky sweet chili glaze and topped with sesame seeds. The calamari rings were tender and coated with just the right amount of batter, and were tossed in sauce in time to be brought out and eaten before getting soggy. With the slightly spicy glaze reminiscent of orange chicken, it was a fun and tasty appetizer to share and filled three of us easily.Swagger had the pub burger, with bacon, cheese, and caramelized onions. He said it was a good burger and that it was cooked well, but that the bun was of a low quality and fell apart too easily. The flavor was too overpowering and would have been better with a different bread. The sogginess wasn't helped by the grilled onions, which were too wet and tore apart the bun. The other toppings were fresh and plentiful, though. Seeing the bacon on Swagger's burger made me realize how badly I wanted bacon! It looked hearty and generously portioned.My burger was on a bun I'd been trying to find all over since reading about its popularity in the New York Times- a pretzel bun. God, those are good. So when I saw a pretzel burger with swiss cheese and honey mustard, I had to have it. The bun was cute and shaped like a little pretzel and had that smooth, thick brioche texture, but was extremely bland, aside from a slightly yeasty flavor, and lacked that rock salt on top. It didn't seem to taste like a pretzel and could have stood to be crispier on top. The egginess worked well with the burger, though.The burger itself was not done enough and leaked out juices all over the sandwich, rendering the bottom pretzel bun soggy and hard to maneuver. It was not seasoned at all, aside from its outer char, and had more of a burnt meat flavor than anything else. This completely overpowered the honey mustard, which was already evaporated from the heat of the burger, and mixed with the cheese. Ideally, this would have had more sauce, maybe a mayo or more mustard, and would have been thinner and less charred.Keepitcoming had a grilled chicken sandwich with avocado, brie, and bacon on a whole wheat ciabatta roll and she really loved it. Who doesn't like melty brie? The chicken was tender and moist and grilled perfectly on the outside, with a ripe and creamy avocado studding the inside and constructed on top of the brie so the cheese melted evenly. The bacon had a nice smoky flavor and was perfectly crisped. The bun, like ours, wasn't anything special and tasted more like a standard whole grain bread than a ciabatta roll, but the inner core of flavors were worth it.With these meals were two kinds of fries. Keepitcoming and I got pub fries and sweet potato fries, respectively, and I think we each liked the opposite better, because we kept sneaking off each others' plates! The pub fries were crispy and thickly battered with a nice rock salt coating and a good seasoning. My only complaint was that they were lukewarm when they came out on our plates. Piping hot, I could have eaten more of these.My plate was full of crispy, thin sweet potato fries. These were also fantastic and had the perfect amount of salt. I would have eaten these on their own with a little dipping sauce. They were soft on the inside and naturally sweet.Since SBC's dessert menu looked interesting, we decided to give a few things a try. Swagger opted for the cinnamon creme brulee, and Keepitcoming and I shared a red velvet cupcake. Unfortunately, we should have asked about the desserts being made in house. They were not very good representations of their genre.The creme brulee was cold and had a mushy, yielding layer of sugar on top. The pastry cream was clumpy and tasted more like custard, and we tasted literally no cinnamon at all. The portion was definitely too large for one person to enjoy. I feel that this could have been heavily elaborated on and improved, especially with such a warm, comforting flavor like cinnamon and such a versatile dessert base.To add insult to injury, Keepitcoming and I were served a cupcake that was extremely small. This was a boon in our consumption, though, because the end product was dry, crumbly, and dense. Not at all moist and fluffy like a cupcake ought to be. From the texture and temperature of the cupcake and density of the frosting, it was clear that this was simply thawed out of the refrigerator when ordered.For such an illustrious flavor, the red velvet was bland and not chocolatey or rich. We picked idly at this and didn't bother to finish. A disappointing end to an average dinner, unfortunately. I'd try this again, but at my own risk and at a time with less patronage to ensure more care on my meal. It still beats base treatment at Caseus, though.

Smith Island Baking Company Coconut Cake

The object that is now on my desk is probably the closest I will ever come to having a live infant. Chances are, I am also taking better care of it. I've never seen a food object this big. It weighs about as much as a normal baby. This object is wrapped in protective cardboard and plastic and enclosed in a firm tin. It takes two hands to lift and is fragrant and sweet. Later on, I will stab it with a knife and consume its tender flesh.This happens to be the ten layer coconut cake from Smith Island Baking Company. Put your phone down. I've extended my birthday to a two-week extravaganza just so that I can say that this is another really excellent birthday cake. The cake company has an extensive history with drama and murder and lobsters, none of which actually happen, but the part that I was excited to hear more about had to do with the composition of the cake. Apparently, the frosting is not buttercream, but cooked fudge, rendering it preserved and able to hang out unrefrigerated underneath its protective dome for up to weeks at a time.This is good news for college students. We love to leave edibles out in the open for weeks at a time, and with a cake of this size and heft, I can't see us finishing it anytime soon. The nine inch cake serves at least sixteen people, and that's with extremely generous slices. Keepitcoming and I chipped away at small slivers of cake, because not only is the cake tall, it's very, very dense.

The cake came covered in coconut with ten layers of moist, soft, pound cake goodness layered with vanilla fudge frosting. The frosting never burnt our throats and was adequately sweet, with a nice vanilla flavor. The cake absorbed all the toppings and ended up staying luscious and buttery. All the flavors mixed perfectly and the coconut was extremely moist.Despite being in thin, thin layers, the pound cake was very filling. It is entirely impossible to eat this in any fashion other than thin, transparent slivers. With the beautiful negligence one can bestow upon this dessert, one could plausibly subside off this for at least a few weeks. It's a really impressive and flavorful dessert that would make a fantastic gift or addition to a party. It comes in a reusable tin for future events. I plan on presenting dinner to Keepitcoming with flourish from now on.

Caramel Cake

Ask me for a recipe, and I'll give it to you — duh, I have a food blog. Share the good times and tasty treats, I say! But some people keep recipes secret, and will not give them out to even their best friends and family. Where's the sense in that?

We have a relative in our family who makes the best caramel cake ever. Ever! It's her dish and her duty to bring it to every family and holiday gathering. Everyone looks forward to her caramel cake, and even lines up at the dessert table before hitting the main buffet line to assure that they get a piece. Outstanding cake!

But the recipe is a secret. It will die with her, and that is a shame. History and memories lost.A while back I tried to recreate her caramel cake using a recipe from A Gracious Plenty, a book by John T. Edge of collected recipes from the South, thinking that Mr. Edge probably rounded up a good caramel cake recipe. The cake was great, but the icing was not so great, and caramel cake is all about the icing.

Fast forward a few months, and, hello, September 2010 issue of Food and Wine magazine featuring a recipe for caramel cake!

But wait, the recipe is from The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, a new, and yet (but soon) to be published collection of Southern recipes that is also edited by John T. Edge. I ran down stairs to check my edition of A Gracious Plenty to make sure the recipes weren't identical, and they weren't (yay!), so it was onward with the recipe for caramel cake in Food and Wine.

Outstanding! Fabulous! Delicious! Perfect! Just as I remembered! Caramel Cake
Adapted from Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

The icing is fabulous, but I did run into a small problem with it. I waited the recommended 15 minutes before mixing the icing, and mixed the icing for the recommended 15 minutes before pouring it over the cake, but it was still too warm, so spent the next hour scraping puddles of soft caramel off the plate and back up the sides of the cake until the icing had finally cooled enough to stay up. The lesson here is that you might want to wait a bit longer before pouring the icing over the cake.

Cake
1 cup whole milk
4 egg whites, room temperature
2 1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups sifted cake flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into tablespoons, softened
3/4 cup heavy cream

Icing
3 cups sugar
3 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup heavy cream

• Butter 3 8-inch cake pans (I used 2 10-inch cake pans), line bottoms with parchment paper. Butter the parchment paper and flour the pans, removing excess flour.
• Cake: In a bowl, mix 1/4 cup milk, egg whites, and vanilla.
• In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add butter and the remaining 3/4 cup of milk. Mix until smooth. Add the egg white mixture in 3 batches.
• In another bowl, beat the heavy cream with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Stir 1/3 of the whipped cream into the batter, then fold in the rest.
  
• Divide batter between the pans, smoothing the tops.
• Bake in a 350 degree, pre-heated oven for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
  
• Let cakes cool 10 minutes on a baking rack, then remove from pan, remove parchment paper, and let cool completely.
• Icing: In a saucepan, stir 2 1/2 cups of the sugar with the corn syrup and milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. Keep warm.
• In a large, deep saucepan (size is important because caramel bubbles up and it extremely hot) sprinkle the remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until an amber caramel forms.
  
• With care, poor the warm milk mixture over the caramel. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring until the caramel dissolves, then stop stirring. Without stirring, let the caramel cook until the caramel reaches 235 degrees on a candy thermometer. Remove from heat.
• Into the caramel mixture, stir in the butter, vanilla, and 1/4 cup of the heavy cream.
  
• Pour caramel into a bowl and let cool for 15 minutes, then beat in the remaining 1/4 cup heavy cream with an electric mixer until creamy, about 15 minutes.
• Cake Assembly: Set one layer on a plate. Pour enough icing over top to cover the top of the layer. Top with a second layer and cover the top with icing. Add the third layer of the cake and pour the remaining icing over the top of the cake, letting it run down the sides. Using a spatula or knife, spread the icing evenly around the cake.
• Let cake stand for 2 hours to set the icing before serving.
  

Peach Upside Down Cake

It's peach season, the most yummiest of seasons! Besides being the sweetest, juiciest, most satisfying of summer fruits, peaches rank number one for me in fond childhood summer food memories. It just sort of comes with the territory when you grow up in South Carolina, the first second largest grower of peaches (we all know monstro-agro California doesn't really count, right?).

One of those memories is of peach upside down cake my Mom used to make after visiting the State Farmer's Market, a huge market with 500 stalls (makes Philly's city markets look laughable) about a mile from our house where sun-wrinkled, old farmers from all over the state would convene to sell the season's bounty out of the back of their filled-to-the-brim pick-up trucks.Sweet peach slices are placed in melted butter and brown sugar at the bottom of a pan, then a basic, homey cake batter is poured over top, and the whole thing is popped in the oven. Out comes what looks like any ordinary cake, but upon a flip of the pan onto a platter, the caramelized peaches and magic of peach upside down cake is revealed. Oh, how I loved that flip of the pan!

My mom's recipe for peach upside down cake must have appeared in a magazine or popular cookbook in the 70's, because I can find identical recipes (almost word for word) out there, so there's a good chance you've eaten this cake, too. I did a little updating to bring the cake into the 21st century: butter replaces vegetable shortening; and the brown sugar and butter that the peaches sit in has been slightly reduced.Peach Upside Down Cake

1/4 cup butter, plus 1/3 cup butter for batter
3/4 cup light brown sugar
3-4 large peaches, peeled and sliced
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
2 eggs
1 2/3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt

• Place 1/4 cup butter and brown sugar in an oven-proof skillet and heat slowly on stove-top, stirring constantly until well browned.
  
• Remove skillet from stove, and place peaches in melted brown sugar and butter mixture. (If you don't have an oven-proof skillet, just transfer melted butter and brown sugar mixture to a medium-sized oven-proof dish before adding peaches.)
• In a large bowl, cream together 1/3 cup butter and sugar. Add milk, vanilla extract, almond extract, and eggs and mix thoroughly.
• In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt.
• Add flour mixture to the wet ingredients and mix until incorporated.
  
• Pour batter over top of peaches in skillet, smoothing batter out to the edges.
  
• Bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 30-40 minutes, or until the middle is firm and the top is golden.
  
• Cool cake for 10 minutes, then place a platter on top of the cake dish. Carefully invert the cake dish while holding the platter on top so that the cake slides out onto the platter . . . upside down!
  
• Serve warm or room temperature.
  

Wagamama, Boston, MA

On a trip with some friends, I ended up eating at Wagamama in Boston, and checking out their modern and funky flair. I only ordered some cheesecake, but the lovely humans around me were more than inclined to share their dishes, too! The restaurant had a bright, bustling family style atmosphere of eating, with benches on long tables, and during that time, I got really close to the people I was with.

First on the menu was the ebi chilli mein, ordered by the wonderful Lily and eaten, for a good part, by me! It's a shrimp and noodle based dish with lots of veggies and a red chili and tomato sauce on top. The vegetables were roasted and charred to perfection, and the noodles were both tender and firm, perfectly covered in sauce. There was a good deal of vegetables and a wide range within the dish, but I mainly got peppers, which had a good char, but not as much of a crunch as I'd have liked.Because of the stir fry method of cooking, every single piece of food got dunked in this fantastic chili sauce, which was savory and bright red. Although the sauce had tomatoes in it, I found it slightly egregious that they billed it as a chili sauce when the predominant flavor was tomato, but the sauce had a light kick and a different consistency than your run of the mill marinara.

Of course, there's always a protein in these dishes, and in this case, it was shrimp. Having never been a fan of shrimp because of some bad seafood at a hibachi restaurant some six years back, I've always stayed away from the little crustaceans, but in this dish, it was hard to resist. In my portion alone, roughly 1/3 of the plate, I had at least five big, beautiful, curled shrimp, perfectly pink and bursting with juices. With the noodles and the sauce that they'd soaked up, they had the consistency and moistness of a good cooked chicken breast, with that shrimpy texture, slightly corrugated, and a nice burst, they were a perfect addition to the noodle and vegetable medley, even better than chicken.While I was eating all of that goodness, my cheesecake came. It wasn't just any cheesecake, though. It was a ginger cheesecake on a biscuit base, with white chocolate sauce on top. It was a pretty hefty slice for $3.95, and immediately, I could smell the fresh ginger coming up from the cake. The cheesecake was very moist and creamy, but the texture was different. Within the creamy part, there were little strands, almost like eating an orange, with a similar palatable tang and mouthfeel. That was the ginger, and it juxtaposed the cream cheese base with a spicy POW of heat and that wonderful ginger flavor. I like that this wasn't just a regular cheesecake made with ginger extract or powder, because with the strands of silky ginger, it just went that extra step to making it perfect and firmer than your average cheesecake.

The white chocolate, though thinly drizzled, added a big flavor to the cheesecake as a whole, too. I thought imparted a slightly sweeter flavor to the cake and, like powdered sugar, made it slightly sugary and gave a nice little texture differentiation to it, too. I think that the only part of the cake that I wasn't gushing over was the biscuit crust. While it was definitely an original crust, reminding me of arrowroot biscuits, it was thin and mushy underneath, unable to handle the liquids from the cake, and wasn't crunchy or exciting at all.Now although that was the dessert section of the meal, a few friends and I had ordered the Japanese flatbread as a side and it arrived late, so it was free! So, technically speaking, we had that for dessert. What I thought would be a pillowy, naan resembling bread with toppings on top, hence flatbread, was actually more of a Japanese quesadilla. It was stuffed to the gills with toppings, with monterey jack cheese, chicken, scallions, and sweet corn. The cheese, which is supposed to be sharp, was bland, though gooey, and was more flavorful with the chicken added to it. That was moist and covered in soy sauce, with nice little chunks for easy eating. I was expecting a lot more sweet corn in the bread, as that was what really drew me to it, along with the dipping sauce, but the amount was scattered and sparse, but still sweet when I bit into it. No scallion flavor to be found, rather, they were used as more of a garnish than a flavor additive.

The dipping sauce was strange. What was supposedly chili sauce was more of a paprika tasting, mayonnaise/salad dressing conglomerate with a strange aftertaste that I wasn't able to quite place. I wasn't a big fan of that and favored the plain flatbread over the bread with the sauce. A shame because generally sauces at restaurants are tasty, but this one was off. All in all, I'd love to try more of Wagamama's offerings, and thought that dinner with friends was fantastic and fun. I look forward to more of it in the summertime.