Cream Horns and Almond Cake and Lemon Bars, Oh My!
A few weeks ago, I roped my friend Kate into a visit to the newish branch of Dewey’s Bakery in Harper Hill Commons. We went expecting lunch. I had heard rumors of quiche, and thought we could have a ladylike lunch a la Victorian tea rooms. I envisioned tall ferns. A tinkling fountain, a string quartet? Or at the very least, a selection of savory carbohydrates.
Wrong. While this Dewey’s is more cafe-like than the store in the Thruway shopping center, it’s still solidly stocked with sugary wares. Moravian sugar cake was there. In one corner, two women were mid-photo shoot, working a stack of Dewey’s neon-bright pink lemonade cake squares.
Plan B: Pack a box with pastries and take them back to the newsroom to foist on our co-workers. Sugar, after caffeine, is the drug of choice for many reporters and editors.
We picked out a carrot cake cupcake with cream cheese frosting, a lemon bar, a slice of almond cake, a cherry pop-up (a stunt double for a danish) and Kate’s weakness, a cream horn. Quiche, it turned out, was there - the small, individual pies came in broccoli and cheese, and bacon and onion that day. It was behind the counter, out of sight. It was also semi-frozen.
Then, we took it all back to the office and settled in for our critique. The cupcake was fine, if a little dry. The lemon bar had a nice tang and a shortbread crust, even if it and the cherry pop-up suffered from something I’ve always disliked about many of Dewey’s treats. I know I risk expulsion from Winston-Salem for saying this, but they’re just too sweet. Kate refused to touch the quiches. I did later, at home, and warmed them up in the oven. Meh.
Kate gave the cream horn high marks. It with dusted with plenty of powdered sugar and filled with whipped cream. The almond cake, though, impressed me the most: a dense, moist triangle of intense almondy, marizpany-goodness, capped with a delicate thin sugar top sprinkled with sliced almonds. So it’s not pink lemonade cake. But it’s nice to see Dewey’s try something that relies on ingredients other than sugar for flavor.
