Baked

You may have already picked up on this, but I love to bake. And as part of that, I have to visit a LOT of bakeries to sample their fare. In fact, when I went to London for work last year, I managed to visit four different bakeries. A girl has to see what’s out there, right?

My favorite bakery in the world, though, is Baked in Red Hook.

I stumbled upon Baked after impulsively picking up one of their cookbooks in The Strand (good things come to people who buy books impulsively). The recipes seemed kind of spectacular and the first thing I made was a Bundt cake with shards of caramel scattered on the frosting.

It was the kind of cake that wasn’t hard to make but made people think, “Wow, that’s pretty awesome.” And it was delicious enough that I decided that I had to go to the source. It was kind of like a first-world pilgrimage, especially because I had to take two buses and a train to get to Red Hook. But it was definitely worth the trip.

I’ve been there a handful of times since then, most recently going with two friends on a very rainy Saturday afternoon. It was their first time there and we decided that the best thing to do was to order a bunch of different things and share. We got a bar cookie, a piece of cake with malt frosting and some lemon poppy seed quick bread.

Everything, of course, was delicious.

I recently read that Baked is looking for a space in Manhattan, which is either awful or wonderful. Fingers crossed it’s near my apartment! Or maybe fingers crossed that it’s far away! I honestly can’t decide.