Post-City Bakery, Birdbath rises in West Hollywood

Maury Rubin closed the L.A. outpost of City Bakery in Brentwood this spring but promised he would open a Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery in West Hollywood this year. And so it is. Rubin says he has signed a lease, and a Birdbath bakery -- the first outside of New York -- will open in the newly renovated Pavilions complex at Santa Monica and Robertson boulevards this fall.

"It's a small-scale [700-square-foot] takeout bakery with lunch to go and some unusual beverages," Rubin says. "The food and drink is organic or locally sourced or seasonal or all three."

Expect the pretzel croissant plus cookies, muffins, scones and breakfast tartines. For lunch, small pizzas (including the "green pizza," which just made its debut on the High Line in New York) and pressed sandwiches. Vegan options include the sesame-banana-agave cake, pictured above. And the "unusual beverages" refer to edible flower lemonade, the "Two-Tone" (coffee & chocolate), "foamy" organic orange juice and a new Birdbath hot chocolate. 

Wait, there's more: "some form of shaved ice and/or sorbets and/or frozen custards and/or dessert-like fruit soups," Rubin says. "Eco-themed" pastries include the "What's Your Carbon Footprint?" cookie, "Save the Whale's Tail" turnovers and "Green Energy" cookies (organic butter cookie with jalapeno peppers).

In New York, customers who arrive by bicycle or skateboard get a discount. Here, anyone who arrives in a hybrid vehicle will get a discount.

-- Betty Hallock 

Photo of sesame-banana cakes courtesy of Birdbath. Photo of footprint cookie by Betty Hallock.

The California Cook: Frozen souffle

Think about homemade ice cream, creamy and cold and full of fresh fruit flavor. Think about ice cream so light it seems to float off the spoon. Think about ice cream that comes to the table not in cute little scoops but a good 5 inches deep, so tall it towers above the dish.

You’re not thinking about ice cream at all; you’re thinking about a frozen soufflé.

Now you’re never going to catch me saying anything bad about ice cream, particularly the homemade kind. But ice cream has a certain aesthetic. It’s homespun, like summer evenings on the porch with an old-fashioned wood-slatted churn and a box of rock salt.

A frozen soufflé offers a decidedly different approach, sheer as chiffon and drop-dead elegant.

— Russ Parsons

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Payard serving up sweet scents

Francois Payard has closed his famed New York patisserie and restaurant due to an untenably steep rent increase. (He’s in search of another location.)  Meanwhile, you can evoke his sweet temptations with his “gourmand perfumes,” called Inspiration.

Your sweetie have a thing for chocolate? Seduce with a dab of Lychee Mousse ($42), Pistachio Ganache ($45) and Bergamot Truffle ($48) behind your ears (or elsewhere). Each perfume evokes a signature Payard creation. Available online from www.payard.com.

Me, I’m not so sure I want to smell like a chocolate bonbon. Truffles or an aged aceto balsamico might be more my style

-- S. Irene Virbila

Photo credit: S. Irene Virbila

Culinary SOS: Molasses cookie with a ginger snap

 

The Model Bakery in St. Helena makes a molasses cookie that's hard to forget. So Sarabeth Rothfeld from Woodland Hills asked Culinary SOS to get on the case. The Model Bakery was happy to help, and Times Test Kitchen Manager Noelle Carter adapted the recipe. (The cookies were a huge hit in the test kitchen too. Noelle had to make sure there were enough left for the photo shoot.)

Enjoy, Sarabeth!

And if there's a recipe out there that you're just dying to have, write to us at food@latimes.com and we'll do our best to get it for you. In the meantime, here's a look at some other Culinary SOS requests that we were able to answer.

--Rene Lynch

Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

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Cinco de Mayo recipes: tuna tostadas, carne asada, chicharrones . . .

 

If you are like me, you're always looking for an excuse to break out the chips and guac. So I was happy to dig through the Times Test Kitchen's archives for some recipes in honor of Cinco de Mayo. Still, I wanted to come up with something ... different. (Nothing against refried beans, mind you!)

So this is a photo gallery of the menu I came up with:

There are grapefruit margaritas to start, along with appetizers including radish salsa, tortillas and chicharrones de queso -- roughly translated as fried cheese, tuna tostadas with chipotle mayo and queso de chiva fundido con pipián verde -- roughly translated as more cheesy goodness. For the main course, choose from green corn tamales, El Cholo's famous chiles rellenos, carne asada tacos, achiote-marinated fish tacos, duck tacos with a chile-cherry compote (I told you I wanted different) and two types of veggie enchiladas.

But I wasn't completely nontraditional. I did include guacamole. And, for a finisher, flan. 

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

-- Rene Lynch

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Photo credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Notes from the Test Kitchen: "Over easy" marshmallows

So how do you like your eggs -- er, marshmallows?

We weren't trying for eggs when we tested the recipe for "Marshmallow daisies" for a recent story "Homemade Easter candy, an old-fashioned treat" by Liz Pearson. But that's what we got.  

Every recipe we run in the Food section is tested before it is printed. Many times we're lucky, and a recipe will work perfectly the first time. Other recipes might take a couple, or several, tests to work out any kinks. (We ran a cookie recipe two years ago that went through 17 tests before we were confident enough to publish the recipe.)

With the daisies, we had a little trouble nailing the timing for just one step in the recipe -- how long to beat the marshmallow cream -- and ended up with wildly different results with each attempt. The first test yielded a cream that was much too stiff to pipe. The second (pictured at left) was just a bit too runny.

I contacted the author to consult with her and see what we might be doing wrong. It took

Cake making turns to combat duty on 'Last Cake Standing'

A producer with the Food Network was on the line, pitching cake designer James Rosselle on its biggest, baddest cake challenge yet, "The Last Cake Standing," which starts Sunday. Competitors vie for $50,000 and the title of the "Best Cake Artist in America."

In other words, it was a golden opportunity for the 28-year-old from Whittier (at right) who is looking to open an appointment-only designer cake shop for his fledging business, Elle Cakes. Orders start at $600 and go skyward from there. You can check out a photo gallery of some of his cakes here.

So what did he tell the Food Network? "I told them I had to think about it."

Absolutely nothing against Food Network, said Rosselle, who had already competed in three similar contests for the network and emerged undefeated. But the challenges are so physically and emotionally grueling, he said -- "the audience just sees the tip of the iceberg" -- that he had to do some soul searching and determine whether he was ready to do it again.

Now wait a second. Are we still talking about baking cakes?

If Rosselle sounds like a battle-weary soldier, it's not by coincidence. The melding of two of the most successful genres in TV history -- reality competition and food programming -- have been an unbridled success.

But they get their traction from driving contestants in ways that the regal and genteel Julia Child  would never have imagined.

David Lebovitz invites you to think outside the pint

 

Does the name David Lebovitz ring a bell? If you are like the rest of us, you read his blog to be transported to his dreamy, edible life in Paris. (You can follow his equally amusing/transporting feed on Twitter @davidlebovitz) This week, Lebovitz's writing arrives closer to home: He writes our cover story in today's Food section about ice creams, and his quest to look beyond plain old vanilla. Above: buckwheat ice cream.

Photo: Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times

This week's L.A. Times recipes

All recipes that appear in the L.A. Times' weekly Food section are tested and perfected in our test kitchen before they're deemed fit to print. (That means you don't have to worry about a trial run before serving one of our recipes to company. Rest assured, it should work the first time out of the gate.)

Here's a look at this week's recipes:

BLD's hot fudge brownie sundae

Kushary (rice, lentils and pasta with tomatoes)

Turkish doughnuts with rose hip syrup (Check out the video above)

Nancy's chopped salad

Herbed pork chops with tomatoes, potatoes and spinach

Canton ginger kick

-- Rene Lynch

BLD's brownie sundae just may be the best ever

Lynn Frankel of West Los Angeles wrote to Culinary S.O.S. to get the recipe for the brownie sundae at BLD, at 7450 Beverly Blvd.

According to Lynn, and we quote, BLD's is "the BEST brownie EVER!"

We can't confirm or deny Frankel's claim -- without further research.

Until then, we can say that these brownies were inhaled as soon as Times test kitchen manager Noelle Carter gave us the go-ahead.

Lynn, here's the recipe, as requested. Special thanks to BLD, which helped Noelle adapt it for the home cook.

And here are some additional Culinary S.O.S. requests that Noelle has answered.

-- Rene Lynch

Photo: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times