Midtown Lunch

The other day I dropped by Cucina & Co in Rock Center and was excited to discover that they have added new desserts to their menu including housemade mallomars. Check out sweet marshmallow-y innards after the jump…

The mallomars are palm sized (i.e. larger than the store bought variety) and covered in quality dark chocolate–no waxy chocolate here.

The cookie is a buttery shortbread, and best of all, they’re only 75 cents each. The pastry chef assured us the mallomars would be back today.  (And so will I!)

Also in the new rotation are raspberry whoopie pies and a few other treats that will rotate in. Apparently the recipe has been tweaked since I first tried them last week (photo above is of the first iteration). The cakes are now smaller, domed and more dense than their original incarnation. They look much more like the whoopie pies of my childhood. The raspberry filling is sweet, but manages to skirt being cloying. And the price has gone down to $2.25 (from $3.75 last week, though they haven’t changed their computer program yet, so make sure it doesn’t ring up higher than the posted price). Big win… although even better would be if Cucina & Co revisited their traditional cream filled whoopie pie recipe that I tried in summer ’09 with their new cake technique.

Cucina & Co, 30 Rockefeller Center, Concourse Level, (212) 332-7630