Posts from the ‘Brooklyn’ Category

Mar 5

I Get Baked

Baked in Red Hook is the dream coffee shop for anyone not fully recovered from the first season of Twin Peaks. With its hunting lodge atmosphere and sleek design, you feel like Audrey is going to stroll in any minute. Always busy despite its location in the lonely industrial stretch leading to the piers, it’s customers seem to materialize just outside it’s doors. The bakery offers grown up versions of the sweets you would have wanted all the time when you were a kid, if only you could have found someone to make them for you. Rows of chunky cookies, whoopie pies, malt ball covered cakes, and peppermint marshmallows to serve off little princess plates between cups of pretend tea to your (in my case imaginary) friends. Read more

Dec 13

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I Want to Eat My Christmas Tree

I’m not actually going to do it although my dog has already tried. I debated the practicality of putting up a tree I can only enjoy for a couple of weeks before I return to Miami for Christmas. I decided to be sensible and forgo it until the sweet Vermont hippie who sells trees at the end of my block offered me a little Charlie Browner as fat as it was tall. It just had to come home with me.

It was few years before it occurred to me that I could put up my own tree. Growing up, I’d always thought home would be my mother’s house in Miami until I started my own family. Eventually I sent myself to school in New York and stayed there. Still, the original concept I had as a child lingered, like an idea that only has its own word in a dead language. With every passing year in my Cobble Hill apartment, it felt less temporary and more like home. I stopped saving Christmas for a few days in Miami.

I only let myself buy ornaments after December 26th each year so I have a mix of overlooked but still very pretty decorations, like orphans from central casting. The tree itself is so chubby that I had to bury a lot of the figures just inside the branches so they peek out. I love everything about this tree. I love the floating mandarin in the mushroom hat, I love the mouse in snow boots, I love the polish black and white glass balls, I love the dancer en pointe, I love the peacock…

My tree is sweet just to the point before it becomes saccharine. So naturally, I now want to eat it. But since that would hurt, I’m having people over to enjoy it with me instead. Before everyone goes there separate ways for Christmas, I decided to have a few friends over for a buche de noel. I’ve been dying to make one and it is the traditional time for it. Not being french, it’s not my rule to break.