Eve M. Tai

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

​Brunch at Cafe Flora in Madison Park features the kind of menu you might expect at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle. Dishes team with wild foraged chanterelles, butternut squash and baby greens dripping with vitamins.

But behind the homage to all things healthy and holy is the restaurant's dirty little not-so-secret - traditional beignets from New Orleans. Often likened to a donut, a beignet (ben-YAY) is a deep fried pastry dusted in powdered sugar.

What's not to love?

Proving that vegetarians like to laissez les bon temps rouler as much as carnivores, Café Flora deep fries these yeasty babies into golden crusted pillows.

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Eve M. Tai

The mini squash harvest bread

​Butternut squash is one of Nature's genius ingredients, amenable to both savory soups and Macrina Bakery and Cafe's Squash Harvest Bread. A stalwart in Seattle cafes, the bread is a panopoly of fresh roasted butternut squash, nutmeg and cinnamon topped by generous hunks of walnuts and pumpkin seeds. One slice will fill your daily required good-for-you veggies and nuts/seeds as well as your appetite for wholesome goodness.

Macrina owner-chef Leslie Mackie says that slices of Squash Harvest Bread as well as the mini loaves are their biggest sellers in the Macrina cafes. Also available at locations such as Caffe Fiore, Java Bean Cafes, Nordstroms E-Bars, Top Pot Doughnuts and Metropolitan Markets, the bread is so popular that "There are some days when our wholesale pastry staff is baking close to 95 loaves of our squash bread for deliveries early the next day."

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Eve M. Tai

Decadence on your own kitchen counter

​The days after Thanksgiving may be those of reckoning for some. Having gorged on turkey, cranberries and pies galore, we may call it quits on the feasting for a bit. For others, the holiday merely kick starts our appetite for more, especially homemade pies. But making pies can be so labor intensive that we'd prefer to fantasize for a real or proxy grandmother who appears with a homemade pie to assure us that all is right in the world.

And nowhere is the pie world more right than in the South, birthplace of the pecan pie. Some say pecan pie is a product of New Orleans (likely they were the ones who thought of adding bourbon), others say the housewife of a Karo executive. Whatever its origins, you can be your own grandma and discover that pecan pie really is easy as pie to make.

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​Get Baked is in New York City this week, a sobering task. Choosing among hundreds, if not more possibilities here ain't a pretty prospect - even when you're talking about baked goods. Luckily, my yoga teacher took me to one of her favorite spots in Hell's Kitchen a few years ago and I've been wanting to head back ever since.

So off I go to Gazala's Place, an Israeli diner (709 9th Ave., New York). It's one of those places that make New York New York - sized and shaped like a shoebox awash with amber lighting, the smell of pickled cabbage and music heavy on the finger cymbals.

I used to think that the diner's name was Gazala's Palace - not Place - for good reason. Gazala's is a treasury of breads and rolls mixed up in various permutations with chopped beef and lamb and tahini and fava beans and stewed tomatoes. But as I peruse the menu with the sepia-toned picture of a couple from the old country, the waitress approaches me. A tall blonde with frighteningly erect posture, she orders me to put the menu down.

"You don't want anything on there today," she states. "We have burekas and they are delicious. They come in goat cheese & spinach or goat cheese & sun-dried tomatoes. Which one do you want?"

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Eve M. Tai

Pinkies up!

​Pastries don't usually bring gender bias to mind, but there's something about miniature desserts that are distinctly girlie. At Le Panier, the "Very French Bakery" in Pike Place Market, small is beautiful. And very girlie. Here you'll find rows of petite tarts, each one gleaming with lovingly coiffed lemon, marionberry, chocolate ganache or pear fillings. Despite your better judgment, you'll be hard pressed to resist the urge to squeal and utter words like "sooooo cute" and "darling."

Taste the fruit ones first - in true girlie spirit but of course you'll order all four flavors - before you move on to the deeper velvety ganache.The refreshing and tangy lemon one is best for last. Like four siblings, each tart has its own personality but share common family traits. Some are outgoing, some dainty - all are encased in a buttery crust that blends happily with the filling.

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Eve M. Tai

Come to mama.

​Now that Daylight Savings Time has ended, we've now officially kicked off winter (solstice notwithstanding). Yes, it's time to haul out the lightbox and Vitamin D to ward off months of emotional debilitation. But if you subscribe to baked goods as medicine - and really, who doesn't - fat is where it's at.

Fresh Flours in Greenwood (there's another in Ballard) has baked up its own winter survival kit in their Basque Cake. It's a small round cake with a crusty top - the powdered sugar logo is a nice touch - that reveals a light dry almond meal cake inside. By itself, this would make a lovely tea cake. But the Basque is phatter than that. And we're not just talking about the custard, whose creamy body adds a nice balance to the cake. It's also laced with rum to stoke the body and spirit with a little extra warmth. (Get Baked loves that Fresh Flours lists the Basque Cake as a "Breakfast Pastry" on their website.)

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Eve M. Tai

Apple turnover, Frenchie style

​Le Fournil Bakery in Eastlake bills itself as a "True French Bakery." And indeed with sympathique offerings such as Paris Brest and items named Paysanne this and gateau that, you'd have no reason to doubt the veracity of this claim. Le Fournil consistently turns out pastries that bewitch the eye and the tastebuds.

A recent run to Central Market in Shorewood yielded a happy discovery in the baked goods case -- apple turnovers by Le Fournil. It may be a True French Bakery, but it is anything but snooty if you can score their goodies at a grocery store.

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Eve M. Tai

One potato, two potato, sweet potato pie.

​Sweet potato pie. The words alone charm us, much the way a nursery rhyme might have enchanted us as toddlers. Maybe your mom cooed rhymes to you even as she was spooning pureed sweet potato into your little gaping mouth. (Fortunately, the sweet potato has retained its wholesome personality even if those rhymes haven't.)

Outgrowing our flannel sleepers doesn't mean we're too old for this most beloved of root veggies. Now there's a personal-sized sweet potato pie waiting just for you at Michou Deli in Pike Place Market. Area desk jockeys flock to Michou at lunchtime and salivate over the copious array of sandwiches with fancy Italian names and bowls brimming with Technicolor salads.

But the sweet potato pie misses all the glitz. You'll find them displayed on a humble cafeteria tray with nary a fancy whipped topping, pudgy crust, or adorable little sign in sight.

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Eve M. Tai

Whoop it up.

​Whoopie pies hail from the East Coast--some say from Pennsylvania, some say Maine--but they're loved throughout the land. (It's actually Maine's official state treat.)

Made of two cookie-shaped cakes sandwiching a creamy center, whoopie pies are rather like decadent Oreo cookies. Origin stories suggest that the Amish invented whoopie pies with leftover cake batter, allowing mothers to drop portable desserts into their family lunches. Indeed, the name supposedly refers to the word workmen and children expressed when they found one in their lunch buckets.

OK, so maybe there wasn't a whole lot going on in those days, but who wouldn't get excited over gobbling up two round slabs of cake with cream oozing out of the middle?

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Eve M. Tai

Pie heaven.

​Sweet Mandy B's (1208 West Webster Ave., Chicago) reminds you of a kitchen from the 1920's, perhaps one where your grandmother might have baked trays and tins full of cupcakes and cookies. After creating what she calls Old Fashioned Desserts for friends and family, owner Cindy Levine decided to share the love with her Lincoln Park neighborhood by opening Sweet Mandy B's. The shop serves up the whole good-ole-days gestalt--counters lined with beadboard, walls painted in Easter-egg pastels, and ceramic stands piled high with pie.

The whole thing could be an exercise in faux retro, except that the baked goods are the real deal. Devotees who stop by after work actually order ahead of time in case there's a run on their red velvet cupcakes or chocolate cream pies of choice. On the day of my visit, a trio of fans crowded the register as they awaited their special orders. They were regulars, only instead of baristas calling out their espresso drinks, clerks called out their cakes.

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