Review: Tafu NY

Tafu New York is a Japanese tea shop that opened last fall; this place is literally a 5 minute walk from my office and I've been intending to stop by and see what they have to offer for months now. Somehow it took me until yesterday to actually get around to visiting the store.

I didn't take any photos of the inside of the shop, but it is quite small, with counter seating along one wall and the display counters against the other wall. It's very tranquil inside and the staff were friendly and helpful, and were quick to recommend favorite flavors etc. Now, I know it's a TEA shop and I should have tried some of the teas, but my primary goal was to try the tea SWEETS....and I have too huge of a stash of tea to buy any new ones right now.



So, to that end, I bought a (very, very small) slice of matcha cheesecake and a little bag of 10 tea flavored cookies. As you would expect from a Japanese shop, a lot of attention was paid to packaging.



The texture of this was nice and soft, not dense like American style cheesecakes, with a strong, but not overpowering green tea flavor. With cheaper green tea flavored desserts, sometimes you get a seaweedy aftertaste, but there is definitely none of that here. It's a bit expensive ($4) for the size, but at least I don't feel guilty about it afterwards. Still, I'm going to have a try at reproducing this at home.



I'm not actually sure what all of the flavors are, but the green ones are obviously green tea, I think the paler ones are shiny slim, and the brown ones are vaguely chocolatey. That's my biggest complaint about these--I had a hard time discerning the flavor of the cookie. They do go nicely with a cup of tea, though, and they're cute!

So, although I felt that it was a bit overpriced, I did enjoy the treats I bought. I'd like to go back sometime and check out the tea drinks. In the meantime, look out for a post soon on my version of matcha cheesecake. :D

First (real!) post--Sweet Potato Donuts

This is really a story about how awesome Coinstar is--there is one in the Duane Reade downstairs from my office and so periodically I take my tin of loose change down there and convert it to Amazon gift certificates. It's great! And it has greatly enabled my purchasing of new cookbooks (not that I really neeeed anymore but who can resist?)

Anyway, so the last time I had a gift certificate I was browsing Amazon, trying to decide between a couple of different dessert books when I stumbled across The Sweet Spot, written by Pichet Ong, an apparently self taught pastry chef who's worked for Jean Georges Vongerichten. I've been looking for a book of Asia desserts for some time now and the recipes in this one sounded like a nice balance between traditional sweets and more "fusion" desserts. I mean, I was sold from the moment I saw the recipe for passion fruit dan taht (egg custard tarts).

Sadly, for some reason there were no passion fruits to be found this weekend. I'm not sure why--I can only guess that some other person had also just received their copy of the Sweet Spot and had hogged all the passion fruits for their own efforts. So I decided to try out the sweet potato donuts with roasted apple filling instead. Now, these donuts are baked, not fried and they are slightly fiddly to make just because it takes time for the dough to rise and then to cook the apples separately (although you can do that while your dough is rising) but the biggest problem I had was in shaping the donuts. You can see from the photo above that they sort of look like hockey pucks--that's because I baked them in muffin tins and the batter was too loose to form into a ball shape. However, it was totally worth the effort--the sweet potato flavor really comes through and then you get a lovely tart apple chunk as a nice contrast in the center. They were maybe a tad sweet for my taste; the next time I make them, I'll probably reduce the sugar a bit and add a bit more spice.

Now, to track down some passion fruits so I can make those egg tarts!

Finally biting the bullet

and starting a food blog, although I'm sure other random babbling will creep in, because that's how I roll.