Why I Love Summer

My new favorite thing is the cherry lime Locopop. It's like a party in your mouth! Beautiful bright cherry with enough lime to make it not too sweet and fruity. And the texture is perfect--some Locopops are hard, but this one just melts in your mouth. I usually get the small Locopops, but I have to get the large cherry lime, because the small size is just not enough cherry lime goodness.

Cinnamon Rolls!

I tried the cinnamon rolls at Great Harvest Bakery. Not bad, but skip that and go straight to Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen (and get a biscuit while you're there). Their cinnamon rolls are yummy, except the glaze sticks to the wrapper so sometimes there's not quite enough glaze. But they're very tasty and soft and squishy. Perfect for a lazy Saturday morning.

Lemon-Rosemary Bread

The bread review for today is Weaver Street Market's Lemon-Rosemary Bread, one of my all-time favorites. This time, it was good, but it could be a little bit better. The flavor was excellent (just a hint of lemon and rosemary and a sprinkle of kosher salt on top), and the inside was very soft and tender, but the crust was tough and a little bit too floury. It also has more holes than usual, which is too bad, because this bread is wonderful for making grilled cheese sandwiches, but you can't use holey bread for grilled cheese, because the cheese leaks out of the holes and it gets messy, and I don't like having cheesy fingers. Maybe it would be okay for a grilled parmesan sandwich. Those usually aren't quite so leaky.

Grade: On a good day, this bread would be an A+, but today I'm going to give it an A-

Review: Caramel Rolls from the Daily Grind

Mmmm.....soft, squishy buns....

I've been eating a lot of bread this week. I've been sick, and I figure it's better to stuff myself with bread than eat nothing. So today I stopped by the Daily Grind for a cup of tea on the way to work (on the UNC campus, around to the side of Student Stores--best coffee on campus--the white mocha is a life-changing experience). I got what I thought was a cinnamon bun, but it didn't have any cinnamon in it. I think it was supposed to be caramel or something. Anyway, it was fantastic. Buns don't get any better than that. Gorgeous, sweet, soft and silky, and big enough for two meals. Yeah, I ate a caramel bun for breakfast and lunch. It was just a little bit yeasty, but not too yeasty, and not dry like most sticky bun-type things. The icing could have been better. It was thin and crackly, not soft and gooey. I give it an A (it would have been an A+ if the icing was softer).

If you want to get buns from the Daily Grind, skip the ones that are wrapped in plastic and get the big, gorgeous unwrapped ones (they're all in the pastry case, but some of them are plastic-wrapped and some are just sitting there, looking tasty).

Life is too short to eat bad bread!

Bread Review

I'm lucky to live in a place that has lots of good bread, but sometimes I get bread that looks good but just isn't quite what I was expecting. So for all you bread-lovers out there, here's the first in a semi-regular series of Carrboro/Chapel Hill Bread Reviews.

I was a little disappointed with the demi-baguette from Weaver Street Market. The flavor was good, but the crust was too chewy. It wasn't nearly as hard as Panera bread, but a little too tough. Overall, it gets a B. Maybe a C+. I think it's probably usually better than that--maybe it was just a bad day, or a new baker.