This is how my co-workers and I celebrated Pi Day yesterday:

I lured everyone to the kitchen with promises of “gourmet apple pie” and “artisan ice cream”. I secretly don’t think anyone was disappointed.

Starbucks rolled out a freebie promotion today to introduce their new line of Petites: eight different flavors of cake in different bite-sized forms.

Now through March 12th, any time you purchase a drink at Starbucks from 2 to 5 p.m., you’ll be able to choose from the Birthday Cake Pop, Lemon Sweet Square, Red Velvet Whoopie Pie, Salted Caramel Sweet Square, Carrot Cake Cupcake, Peanut Butter Cupcake, Rocky Road Cake Pop, and Tiramisu Cake Pop.

My co-worker just got the Birthday Cake Pop, and it was the moistest yellow cake covered in icing and sprinkles and put on a stick. Adorable!

Starbucks is promoting the fact that they’re all under 200 calories, but for a two-bite treat, I’d sort of hope so. Still, the lure of anything pink is too great for me, and I’m busy trying to decide which coffee drink will taste best when I soak my cake pop in it.

Check out their Facebook page to see them all and vote for your favourite.

On my last night of Christmas vacation in Ohio, my best friend, Tracey, and I invited my cousin Bethany and our friend Michelle over to her house for cards, videogames, boytalk, and other things girls in Ohio do. Tracey and I decided to make brownies for the occasion, and by that I mean we poured a box mix into a big bowl and added an egg.

Tracey kind of hinted that she wasn’t entirely interested in actually cooking the brownies, because like cookie dough and oysters, brownie batter is best eaten raw. I said, “Well, maybe we can separate half the batter and only cook a small batch.” And she said, “. . . or we could not cook it at all.”

And so we didn’t. We scooped the batter into sundae glasses, put them in the refrigerator to chill, and decided not to tell Bethany and Michelle what it was until they’d taken a bite, lest they think us gluttonous freaks and not give it a chance. Of course we got too excited in the end and had to tell them it was brownie fetus, and they reacted to it quite well, considering. We all sat around Tracey’s kitchen table for hours, playing Euchre and watching the batter stick to our upside-down spoons.

Referring to it as “pudding” made three of us feel much better, but Tracey had no shame, and neither does Faith of An Edible Mosaic, who shares her recipe here.

Photo by An Edible Mosaic

I really, really love chocolate–from the worst mostly-sugar milk chocolate to the bitterest cacao nib–and that’s why I think I don’t care for chocolate cake. Why would I eat chocolate-flavored flour when I could be having a creamy chocolate tart, chocolate ice cream, or even chocolate pudding?

That’s why, since I started fine-dining with my wonderful boyfriend four years ago, I’ve avoided the ubiquitous chocolate soufflé and, in fact, soufflés in general. Little did I know, though, that I was denying myself a real pleasure by not forcing restaurants’ kitchen staff to display their technical prowess for me.

My first great soufflé was at The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges. In an otherwise just-okay meal, this Grand Marnier concoction really stood out with its crusty shell and creamy interior. I’m not saying I have any manners, but I really don’t usually dip my fingers into a serving dish to clean out every last crumb like I did here.

The next one I had–the one that really convinced me–was the green tea soufflé at TriBeCafe. It’s a great place in general with a $23, four-course prix-fixe menu full of only-delicious Japanese-inspired comfort foods, but that soufflé was really something special. It was earthy without being grassy and fluffy without leaving that why-did-I-just-eat-a-plate-of-air? feeling you get from things like angel food cake.

I guess maybe I’m just a sucker for things that are crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside, like French macarons, Oreos, and you. So even though I don’t see myself ordering the chocolate soufflé any time soon, apparently other flavors suit me just fine.

As a lover of intense flavor experiences and creamy desserts, meringue cookies are about the least interesting treat in the entire world for me. They look nice and all, but their taste is always too weak, and biting into them is like biting into a hunk of diabetes-inducing chalk.

But after being served a mango macaron at The Wright for my birthday, I keep finding myself unexpectedly craving those little French cookies. They have the tiniest layer of crunch on their outsides, easily broken just by holding them, but then their centers are somehow super-moist, almost like raw cookie dough. And their flavors are always wildly dense, like heavily-concentrated versions of things found in nature.

So naturally I Googled “best macarons NYC”, because I am a master searcher who doesn’t type out entire questions like, “Where do I find the best macarons in NYC?” like everyone who finds my blog via Google. (I still love you, though.) The first viable result came from some snob from Serious Eats who wrote:

After Paris, the city whose macarons I’m most familiar with is New York City. Unfortunately, after eating NYC’s macarons I think I’d rather wait until my next vacation to Paris than eat another one here. I don’t mean to imply that they’re all horrible—obviously someone likes them or else these shops wouldn’t keep churning them out—but I’ve found most of them to be disappointing.

I kind of want to punch the woman in the crotch. Calling a macaron disappointing is like calling a flavor of ice cream disappointing. Or pizza. Or corndogs. Yes, some corndogs are better than others. And when you’ve had a corndog dipped in pumpkin sauce, I can see how other corndogs wouldn’t live up to it. But you’re still getting to eat an effing corndog, so shut it.

Sorry. I’m just jealous that I’ve never eaten a macaron in Paris.

The writer recommended La Maison du Chocolat for the best of the apparently-unsatisfactory NYC macarons, and incredibly, my boyfriend works right above one. I begged and pleaded and called him things like “darling” and “cuppycake”, but he doesn’t think women should be sitting around eating bonbons on a Tuesday night, so I was left to my own devices.

Luckily, a co-worker informed me that Financier, home of the famed Bûche de Noël, carries them. So I stopped after work and bought a package of 8, all in different flavors.

YOU GUYS. Maybe it’s good that I’ve never been to Paris to compare these to the real things, but glurgglurgglurgglurg. They were so good.