There are lots of great places to sip a cup of posh hot chocolate in New York City, such as the sleek Chocolate Bar, the jewel-box-like Mariebelle, or one of Jacques Torres’ wonderlands, to name just a few. But to this chocolatarian, City Bakery and its velvety elixir reign supreme.

This year City Bakery celebrates its 17th annual hot chocolate festival for the entire month of February, and features more than twenty flavors in rotation. A few–like vanilla bean (2/10), cinnamon (2/25), and malted milk (2/26)–easily sound like hot chocolate marriages made in heaven, and they are. But my favorites tend to be owner/genius Maury Rubin’s quirkier, more adventurous concoctions. On opening night, I sampled a cup of ginger (very good) and drank much of my companion’s banana peel (brilliant) while he wasn’t looking. And I’ll be returning for a few flavors I’ve never tried before: passion fruit cream (2/11), Arabian Nights (I don’t know what it means, but I hope it’s spicy; 2/12), and bourbon (2/27). Bourbon + chocolate = Thank you, Mr. Rubin.

Check out the full calendar of flavors.

If you can’t get to the festival, you can always make your own.

Update (2/14): City Bakery has changed its calendar of flavors a bit since I wrote this post. Rascals. I swear I didn’t make up the passion fruit cream.

I’m off to Vienna, then back to Berlin. See you on the 20th of October–auf Wiedersehen!

I’m off to California to partake in a fairy-tale wedding. So I’m extending the deadline for our Fanciful Foods and Kitchen Witchery Recipe Contest to 11:59 p.m. on September 30. Keep cooking: there are four spots left for excellent entries!

On the 4th of July, while I was lounging around munching on cold lamb kibbeh for breakfast and samosas for lunch, our native son Joey Chestnut set a new world record at the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, polishing off 66 dogs in twelve minutes and defeating six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi of Japan. Chestnut brings the champion’s coveted mustard-yellow belt back to the United States. Kobayashi, who set a new personal record on the 4th despite a jaw injury, gets an admiring salute as well.
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Angélique, our sweet and gracious hostess aboard the Tango, delighted us day after day with beautiful table settings, fancifully decorated butter dishes (I’ll post a link to photos of those tomorrow) and intricately folded napkins. (And I thought I was brilliant when I made little cardinals’ hats out of my napkins at Christmas.) My favorite was this rose design, which she patiently taught us how to make.

Practice this three times and you’ll have it, even if you’ve been drinking wine, golden as this rose, all afternoon.
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You may already think I’m overwrought after that panegyric to my schnitzel. Now I’ll tell you that I almost–almost–cried as I ascended to the 6th-floor gourmet food halls at KaDeWe, the landmark Berlin department store currently celebrating its 100th birthday.
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Joseph Roth Diele, pictured above, serves a satisfying slice of Berlin literary culture. Named for Joseph Roth, an Austrian Jewish writer who lived at this address briefly in 1925, the lively café-bar is decorated with bookshelves, quotes from Roth’s work, and other Roth memorabilia (don’t forget to look up at the ceiling, and don’t forget your German dictionary).
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I said I was packing my bags for France, and I did. But for the moment, I’m on a brief working holiday in Berlin, visiting four museums in a day and having cherry cake for lunch, because I can. (The joy of being a grown-up traveller!)

Encountering Berlin’s treasures–the Brandenburg Gate and the green stretch of Unter den Linden, the spectacular Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the famed bust of Nefertiti for which no film or photo could diminish my reverence–has left me breathless and slightly giddy, an emotional state I usually associate with new love and gifts of shoes.
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I haven’t forgotten. This week, we’ll continue our Seven Deadly Sins series with pride, the vice that goeth before a fall. Which is why I won’t be baking any soufflés. Think tall cake, cocksure poultry, puffed pastry, and one massive savory pie.

Meanwhile, congratulations to the big cheeses of the limerick contest. Many thanks and lovely poetry, everyone!

I loved Buzz’s Original Steakhouse, a forty-year-old establishment just a few yards away from breaking surf on Kailua beach, as soon as I saw the “After the beach, please cover up” and “No tank tops after 5 p.m.” signs nestled among “Poke” and “Fish Burrito” on the palm-tree-shaped specials board.

I also knew I had to try this dessert when our waiter, who was shyly charming and who gave us the “hang loose” sign at the end of every sentence, pointed to it on a tray of similarly alluring items and said “This is the Cocolatta. You won’t find it anywhere else.”
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