Right before I left for Christmas break, my boyfriend and I watched a Food Network show about a company known for its pre-decorated gingerbread houses, and all we could talk about was how badly we wanted to rip the roof off of one of those things and go to town on it with our teeth.

Well, while we were in an-unnamed-discount-store-that’s-taking-over-the-world in December, my best friend, Tracey, and I spotted shelves loaded with gingerbread house kits for only $10 and decided to go for it, not only to make my boyfriend jealous but as an added benefit.

We imagined how hard it’d be to attach the roof to the sides, to keep ourselves from crushing the soft gingerbread underneath the weight of our decorations. What we didn’t find out until we got back to Tracey’s house and took the thing out of the box was that it was preassembled and hard as a rock. But hey, we’re lazy.

Can you imagine how great it is having the job of putting this thing together? Whoever it is obviously doesn’t have to be concerned with neatness, and I fantasize daily about slopping icing onto giant cookies.

The house came packaged with icing mix, hard candy balls, and spearmint leaves. Tracey added the orange slices because we’re gluttons.

Here’s Tracey making a wreath on the front of the house with the bowl of icing beside her. Mixing the icing powder into water was literally the only thing we had to do before we started decorating. You’ll note the giant K on the side of the roof, which I put there, because I’m narcissistic and also uncreative.

The finished product, with Tracey’s Christmas tree in the background to prove that we actually did do this in December and not just last week. Unless Tracey kept her Christmas tree up until March just in case we ever found a gingerbread house kit on super-clearance, which is quite possible.

Beauty shot! You’ll note the fine reindeer-covered fleece blanket Tracey held up as a backdrop for me.

Tracey posed for this picture in which she was pretending to go at the house with a spoon before we figured out that it required a hammer to actually break through any of the gingerbread.

Hard as it was, though, that shit was 4 realz delicious.

My office ordered two king cakes last week under the guise of needing them for a co-worker’s going-away party but actually because I’ve always wanted to try them. The first king cakes were introduced to the southern U.S. by French and Spanish settlers and were originally associated with Christmas but are now traditional in Mardi Gras celebrations. Which makes sense, considering how indulgent they are.

A southern co-worker recommended Paul’s Pastry Shop as the source for an authentic king cake, and the going-away girl choose a lemon over cream cheese and a chocolate Bavarian. I spent the week before they arrived telling everyone we were going to have cake made of baby, because a tiny plastic doll is stuck into the cake post-baking and is said to provide good luck to whoever finds it in their slice.

When we opened up the cake box, we thought it was a lump of unbaked dough, but it turns out that an undecorated king cake is just sort of ugly. Luckily, bags of icing and sprinkles were provided, along with Mardi Gras beads to use as payment for boob-baring. Or, since my office is full of men, manboob-baring.

Jack dons the provided gloves–a little freaky, right?–and prepares to ice the cake.

Ash goes for decorative swirls, but we figure out later that Jeff’s way of just slopping it on in a straight line makes for better coverage and easier hand-spreading.

Nik, it turns out, has no future in cake-decorating.

The finished product!

Dripping with icing and caked in layers of sprinkles, it was a diabetic’s worst nightmare. The cake itself was mostly a thick, sweet bread with the tiniest layer of lemon preserves or chocolate spread and a layer of cream cheese baked into it, and it was good, but it wasn’t the sort of super-moist cake we usually go for in the U.S.

The best part was the way the icing collected in pools around the edges of the pan and began to harden. Some people acted grossed out when I spooned the extra icing onto slices of the cake, and those people are no longer my friends.

Jack, the cake slicer, isn’t so pleased with the Valentine’s Day decorations that arrived with one of the cakes.

It was clear to Jack in slicing the first cake which piece the baby was in, so of course he took that piece for himself.

After licking the baby clean, Jack threw his away, but

Steve, who found the baby in the second cake, proved to be a doting caregiver.

Happy Fat Tuesday!

I figured it was too late to post about my first bûche de Noël experience before I left NYC to spend the holidays with my family in Ohio, but since Blondie & Brownie revealed that Financier is still selling them, it looks like I’m good to go.

Being from the Midwest and being very much culturally sheltered, I had no idea what a bûche de Noël was until my office decided on a whim to order a couple of cakes from the downtown Financier Patisserie the week before Christmas. When I called at 3 p.m., the order-taker told me that they were down to a couple of roll cakes, one in white chocolate and one in Grand Marnier. I told her I’d take them, but she kept stressing that these were not normal cakes and kept asking if I was sure I wanted them. I was like, “Lady, cake is cake.”

But no! A traditional bûche de Noël is a French sponge cake rolled up with frosting to resemble a log, complete with buttercream bark, meringue mushrooms, and protruding branches (made of chocolate, in this case). The Grand Marnier version was entirely untraditional, but the mound of berry-flavored mousse was no less delicious.

I usually think Financier’s cakes are too light and fluffy to really count as a decadent dessert (because I’m a glutton), but the yule log was a total exception and one that I’ll look forward to next year. It seems like the woman at Financier shouldn’t have been warning me about the cake but should’ve been asking why I wasn’t buying all three.

Is this something normal, non-Midwestern people often eat for Christmas?

I didn’t love the pretzel croissant. It has its own website. People who care about food gush about it. But I was unimpressed.

It was flaky, buttery, light, and bread-flavoured, which are all of the things a croissant should be. So maybe the problem is that I like pretzels much more than I like croissants, and this was no pretzel. There was no thick pretzel skin, no dense pretzel insides, and no salt in sight, let alone the chunks of crystals I want to see.

But it was a good croissant, and I was still finding butter flavor trapped in between my fingers for hours after eating it. Don’t ask why I was licking between my fingers for hours.

For our final Restaurant Week meal, my boyfriend and I were torn between:

A) Tocqueville, which had a decent menu but looked especially formal, and

B) City Crab, which we’ve been meaning to go to anyway but which only listed their entree as any of the chef’s daily specials. And that’s scary to a non-seafood-lover.

So we chose Tocqueville in the end and think it may be the best Restaurant Week dinner we’ve had. It’s hidden down 15th Street near Union Square, and although I’m sure it cuts down on their business, the restaurant’s quiet location only adds to the feeling of being special–maybe even elite–that you experience upon entering. The hostess leads you back a short hallway to the dining room, which is the size of your studio apartment but with much higher ceilings and much posher furniture. Soft French music complements your intimate conversation as you recline on a pillow at a plush corner table.

And the service! Our waiter was not only attentive but well-dressed and equipped with a brilliant accent. The manager came to talk to us twice, first to ask us how we found out about the restaurant and to explain the greenmarket menu, which is decided upon daily based on what’s available at the Union Square farmer’s market. The second time he came around, it was to ask us if we’d visited a nearby restaurant; it seemed like a friendly conversation about Portuguese food, but we figured the two restaurants must be related somehow. (Later, we found that the former Tocqueville chef is now there.)

The best part, though, was that we were brought not one but two dishes on the house. The first was a cool watermelon soup with giant lumps of crab, meant to be sipped directly from the tiny bowl as an amuse bouche,

and the second was an array of amazingly flavorful sorbets that arrived when our ordered desserts were taking too long.

From left: dark chocolate, kiwi (the best!), melon, lime-coconut, and pineapple.

Here’s the Restaurant Week menu:

I don’t like tomatoes, and Kamran warned me that I probably wouldn’t care for chicken livers (WRONG!), so I went with the asparagus vichyssoise, and it was both lovely and refreshing. I’d heard the word vichyssoise before but had no idea what it was, so when the waiter plopped a bowl of asparagus parts down in front of me, I thought that was the deal. But then he poured a super-creamy soup around the parts, and it only got better.

Kamran’s chickweed salad was even better, though, because the salad wasn’t the focus at all. The toasted bread and chicken livers were crunchy and sweet, and even as a tomato-hater, I loved the garnish and vinaigrette.

I was slow to give up the steak, but gnocchi is one of my favorite foods, and I knew I’d regret not ordering it. I know it’s supposed to be light and fluffy, but I have no idea why anyone would want a non-dense dinner. It was the perfect density for me, so do with that what you will. I could take or leave the arugula, but the cheese and the butter sauce were mouth-watering.

Kamran thought his steak was perfectly cooked and loved the tomato hyssop marmalade around it. I thought it was horribly rare, of course, but even I’ll admit to not hating the marmalade.

After the assorted sorbets, we were already so in love with Tocqueville’s desserts that what we actually ordered didn’t much matter, but we happened to enjoy them, too. My torte was the darkest, richest chocolate

and Kamran’s souffle was creamy and light with berries at the peak of their ripeness.

Even if the food had been terrible, the service and atmosphere were so nice that I would go back in a second for another quiet, romantic meal. Their Restaurant Week menu is available until August 28th, and they have a year-round lunch prix fixe, so there’s plenty of opportunity for you to try it out, too.