Where to Get Your Holiday Treats in Midtown
This is it. Hanukkah starts tonight at sundown, and this weekend is full of Christmas. Do you know where you’re picking up special holiday treats for your employees–bosses, I’m looking at you–or to impress your in-laws?! Though Midtown might be lacking in the bakery department, there are still a few spots around to pick up some holiday desserts! I did some scouting on where to pick up everything from dreidel cookies to bûches.
The first stop for anyone looking for anything holiday is Grand Central Market, specifically the new Zabar’s area. They have quite the impressive holiday hand decorated cookie display complete with a hipster Santa and penguins. For the Jews among us, they only have menorahs, but you can head a few booths over….
To Zaro’s and their dreidel cookies. Zaro’s also has gingerbread men and Christmas tree cookies, as well as the requisite packs of blue-and-white cookies, which can also be found at Junior’s on the other side of GCT.
If you really want people to like you, you should head downstairs to the food court and pick up some Flex Donuts. Chef Zac Young was hopeful that they’d be doing some special holiday flavors this week, but even if they don’t, a box of these is a sure to be hit. Just don’t bring the Maple Bourbon Bacon to a kosher household, but I’m sure you already know that.
Those of you looking for authentic sufganiyot, head on over to Ess-a-Bagel (3rd btw 50th+51st). As you can see $1.75 each for jelly-filled or chocolate-covered custard. No, they’re not labeled “sufganiyot” because let’s seriously imagine the tourists dealing with that. Added bonus: they’re kosher!
Anyone in need of an impressive fancy dessert should head to their nearest Financier, or fight the crowds at Bouchon Bakery in Rockefeller Center or Columbus Circle. Both bakeries are making French Bûche de Noëls. The cakes consist of Génoise, a sponge cake, and good French buttercream. At Bouchon, you can get excellent miniature versions for $6.95 in the two flavors they have this year: chocolate/hazelnut and vanilla/orange. Financier has a wider range of flavors for the yule logs. Both places also have other cakes available, like a chestnut cake at Financier, and actual delicious-looking fruit cakes at Bouchon.
In Midtown West, your choices are more limited. Donna Bell’s (49th btw 8th+9th) is hoping to have a few special holiday treats, other than the seasonal items they have now like their marshmallow sweet potato bar. You can also keep an eye on Sweetery’s Twitter, @SweeteryNYC (also on the ML Twitter Tracker) to see if they’ll be around; it looks like they might be roaming Midtown West during the evening all week. They’ll be having a variety of hand decorated sugar and gingerbread cookies available on the truck.
Posted by Blondie at 1:30 pm, December 20th, 2011 under Sweets.
1 Comment | RSS comments feed for this post
Zabar’s needs to get some signage going about which kind of cookie is which. I bought a small assortment (polar bear, house, tree, etc.), and it turned out that more than half of them were shortbread, not gingerbread. Yeah, it’s on the label on the back of the wrapper, but you don’t really think about that when buying iced Xmas cookies.
That said, the gingerbread one was delicious.