Diversion: Hot Chocolate with Melting Peeps, and Easter Treats in the Big City

Everyone I've talked to agrees that Easter is too early this year. Not that we can help it. St. Patrick's Day and Easter in the same week is wrong. The presence of two parades of that magnitude in New York City in the same week is wrong.

With the winter chill still lingering, wool coat collars turned up against the wind, I'm not feeling appropriately pastel. I'm willing, nevertheless, to make the best of the situation at hand. In that spirit, I decided that nothing would be better this afternoon than a winter cup of hot chocolate with a couple of melting yellow Peeps.

It's prettier and tastier than I imagined, and the Peeps looked sweet during their final sleep of drowning chocolate death.


Edible Easter Creations in the City

In strolling about the city, I've taken note of some of the fine Easter creations of lower Manhattan's bakeries and chocolate artists. Among them (with links):

Jacques Torres (350 Hudson at King St. and285 Amsterdam Ave at 73rd St.) features chocolate-covered Peeps in milk or dark chocolate.

Duane Park Patisserie (179 Duane St.) makes pretty Easter baskets out of chocolate.

Vosges (132 Spring St.), always edgy in chocolate land, offers Easter Bunny hat boxes with caramels, 1 Red Fire Bunny, 1 Barcelona Bunny & ½ lb Bapchi's Caramel. Or go for the flying pig made out of a chocolate-bacon blend. Hmmm....

I recommend MarieBelle's Aztec Hot Chocolate for at-home science projects involving melting Peeps. 484 Broome St.

Image: melting Peeps in hot chocolate. Walking Off the Big Apple, at home in her kitchen, somewhere in the free Republic of Greenwich Village. March 18, 2008.

Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate and One for the Wool Trade

The Powell Building (1892) at 105 Hudson Street (at Franklin St.), shown on the left, was designed by Carrere & Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and the Frick mansion, among other others. In 1890, Henry L. Pierce, the head of a chocolate company in Massachusetts, wanted a nice building for his company, a step up from the plain vanilla of industrial architecture. Hence, this elegant Beaux Arts-style building.

After Pierce died his estate sold the building to candy manufacturer Alexander Powell who, in turn, hired his architect to enlarge the building and add stories. In the 1970s the building's higher floors were converted into residences. The Japanese restaurant Nobu (restaurant website) is on the first floor, in the same place that Powell once displayed his chocolates.

The Renaissance revival building at 260 West Broadway (at Beach St.), its curved entrance shown on the right, was built as the New York Wool Exchange in 1894-96. The wilier wool traders of New York hoped to trump the wool traders of Boston with such an edifice, but the scheme never worked. In 1907 the American Thread Company took over the building, and since the 1920s it's been known by that name. Now, not surprisingly, the building is operated as a condominium.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple. Part of the series, Walking Off Tribeca.

For those in search of chocolate and were disappointed reading this post, please see Wee Willy WOTBA's Downtown Chocolate Walk, for chocolate locations north of Tribeca.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch

When I returned from my long walk and lunch in Tribeca today, I felt over-stimulated but more tired than usual. Traveling can be both stimulating and exhausting at the same time. Beyond the physical demands of exploration, an encounter with new sources of stimuli can induce mental fatigue. Walking around unfamiliar streets takes more work than the ones you already know.

Some of my haphazard impressions of the day in Tribeca:

enjoying the facades of the buildings along White Street;
the glimpses of the Hudson River and all that blue;
Duane Street and its gentle and elegant restraint;
the jarring presence of neo-Brutalist towers juxtaposed with more human scale nineteenth-century buildings;
a painter putting the finishing touches on a propped-open door of Robert De Niro's not-yet-open Greenwich Hotel and catching a look at some of the fine detailing;
the eight-foot crater on Church Street where a water main blew this morning, and hundreds of city workers trying to fix it;
a flower market with seasonal tulips and hyacinths;
a wide and busy Church Street;
cell phone conversations, 90% of which were about Eliot Spitzer.

Mostly, I remember lunch. I didn't have a particular spot picked out in advance, and I walked around until I was hungry. The Cosmopolitan Cafe at 95 W. Broadway looked good. The cafe was intimate and well-decorated with tables close together and a selection of books lined against the wall. I chose a table in the back. I enjoyed the quiche of the day - spinach and gruyere, and it came with a nice salad with lemony dressing and a selection of fruit. Afterwards, the proprietor surprised me by placing a cup of hot chocolate and a plate with a ginger cookie on the table and saying it was their "treat."

After that gesture, I enjoyed the walk home, even if I'm too tired to remember anything now. I may live in Greenwich Village, but Tribeca seems far away.

Here's a find! A blog about food in Tribeca: Taste of Tribeca.
Website for the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate, and One for the Wool Trade
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Wee Willy WOTBA's Downtown Chocolate Walk

Yesterday was the colonel's birthday, so he asked me to go over to Bruno Bakery and buy a couple of cakes for an impromptu celebration. It's a hard job, but someone's got to pick out the chocolate cakes. Now, facing the prospect of Valentines Day, I must once again go back into the world and find chocolate candy. Gee, life's tough. Fortunately, chocolate has known health benefits, so I can rationalize any purchase. Buying a little chocolate also helps the economy by boosting consumer "sentiment."

I first devised this self-guided chocolate walk for visiting friends who expressed interest in such a thing. I sent them to chocolate meccas in SoHo - Vosges, Mariebelle, and Kee's, stores within just a few blocks of one another. Now I feel compelled to broaden the walk to include Jacques Torres, Chocolate Bar, and a few pastry shops that also feature quality chocolates. I'm also partial to the very elegant La Maison du Chocolat up on Madison, but that's too far off my personal grid.


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Shopping for Valentines Day should also include a roundup of chocolate-covered strawberries, red velvet cakes, a big bouquet of red roses, and a bag of those little hearts with sayings on them. Greeting cards may be involved. After festively decorating the dining room table with these items, you've pretty much taken care of your own needs and could consider what to get for anyone else.

Image: Inside a case at Bruno Bakery (musical pleasures await at the website), LaGuardia Place. February 2008.

Walking Off the Big Apple's Lenten Gelato Diet

While walking on Bleecker Street yesterday and looking at all the food in the windows of the street's foodie blocks, and stopping for awhile to watch the firemen put out a fire above Indian Taj (all of which I'll show you soon), I held in my hand the item you see before you until it disappeared. Gelato, I thought, would be my answer to the Grapefruit, though I greatly enjoy the grapefruit in its ruby red variety, in much the same way as that of my fellow countryman, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Waking up on this Wednesday and noting it was to time to count all the sins of omission and sins of commission for the next forty days, as I was well trained by the priests of the Episcopal Church, I have set upon a diet plan based on gelato. As the Ice Cream Diet seems to be resurrected every decade, I think it's time to move on to the softer, more artisanal version of frozen wonderland. I am sort of over frozen yogurt. Gelato incorporates less air in its making than ice cream and should be lighter in fat.

For the Gelato Diet I will incorporate a twice-weekly indulgence with the 10,000 steps-a-day program, for, indeed, that's the 4.5 to 5 mile walking range that should allow me to walk off most of it. I also plan to cut back on portion size at every meal.

Twice a week for the next forty days, I will also order the gelato on a cone, as the cone provides practical and aesthetic pleasures while walking. Walking down the street with a cone of gelato frees the other hand to wave at friends and admirers.

Image: Stratchiatella and dark chocolate nutella gelato. L'Arte del Gelato, 75 Seventh Avenue, NY, NY.