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3 treats we're loving this week:
1. Pichet Ong's yuzu-lime flowers (pictured right, $1.95 each). Two elements make this one of the best cookies in the city now: (1) The butter–and there's plenty of it in these shortbreads; and (2) the interplay between the sharp citrus flavors and the subtle saltiness of the pastry. If biscotti are coffee's perfect partner, this might just be the dream date to make tea swoon.
2. Cupcake Café's seasonal blackberry crumb cake (pictured left, $2.00 a slice). Really, “slice” is an understatement–this is coffee cake served in blocks as large as some European cars. For two bucks, you'll get enough of the tender cake to share between two very hungry snackers. We especially love how the rich blackberries that top each slice practically melt and fuse into a gooey icing. Cupcake Café's blueberry crumb cake is good stuff–better than their cupcakes– 
but the blackberries are sweeter and extra-tart in all the right places. Grab a slice before the summer season ends.
3. city bakery's peanut butter cookies (pictured on Flickr alongside their similarly excellent bakery muffin, $1.50 for two). Traditional peanut butter cookies do not spread much when they bake, which is why they retain the crosshatch pattern from the tines of a fork. But city bakery takes bakery shape-retention to a whole new level with peanut butter cookies that look like scoop-shaped Pompeiian ice cream artifacts, frozen in time. The trick, we suspect, is freezing the dough solid before baking, but no matter how it is achieved, the cookies benefit from being baked in semispheres, rather than rounds, as it is tough to find a burnt edge anywhere, and inside the center of the cookie, the super-short pastry ends up crumbly and soft. Just a small change in shape gives this classic a new dimension. Consider us converts to the scoop.
