World's Largest Under the Big Top © Frank H. Jump
Hipstamatic app © Frank H. Jump
iPhone Shots
Golden Gate – Fancy Fruits & Vegetables – Summer 2010
Ebinger Baking Co – Flatbush – Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
Albemarle Road - Flatbush, Brooklyn - iPhone shot with Hipstamatic app - © Frank H. Jump
18th Avenue, Bensonhurst - © Frank H. Jump
Ebinger Baking Company, with a chain of stores across the boro, was founded in 1898 by George and Catherine Ebinger. Famous for their cakes and pies, and especially their Blackout Cake, they closed in bankruptcy on August 26, 1972.
There have been attempts to revive the bakery brand under that name, but none, so far, have been successful.
Named for wartime blackouts, their famous and beloved chocolate-pudding-filled Blackout Cake was a chocolate layer cake filled and frosted with dark fudge and dusted with chocolate cake crumbs that was so popular that other bakeries in the borough, like SeaLane, produced inferior knock-offs.
Other Ebinger favorites were a butter cream cake decorated with three small pistachio nuts in the center of the top and Chocolate hard-icing cake with a hard, bittersweet chocolate icing.
Supposedly the Ebinger family has all their original recipes under lock and key and is uninterested in releasing them, but facsimile recipes pop up once in a while. Here is a recipe for Blackout Cake from Cooks Country TV that gets very good reviews, if you’d like to try making it yourself (registration is required to see the recipe, but it’s free).
There is another version published in the Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2008 cookbook (see below for a link to it on Amazon.com).
Speaking of bakeries, another Brooklyn institution is Entenmann’s Bakery, founded by William Entenmann who came to Brooklyn from Germany in 1898. Today, the Entenmann’s brand is on over 100 different kinds of baked goods. Entenmann’s is now owned by Bimbo Bakeries USA, the American subsidiary of a gigantic Mexican/Multi-national food production corporation, which also owns brands such as Thomas’ (english muffins), Arnold (bread) and Boboli (pizza crusts). – Brooklyn dot com
Other Ebinger postings on the Internet:
- 18th Avenue – Forgotten NY
- Brooklyn dot com – What ever happened to Ebinger’s Bakery?
The Train Pulls into Gouldsboro – Gouldsboro Historical Society – NEPA
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
July 24, 2010 - iPhone Shot with Hipstamatic App © Frank H. Jump
Purple Yam – A Rainy Day Treat – Ditmas Park, Brooklyn
Purple Yam - 1314 Cortelyou Road, Brooklyn - 718.940.8188 - © Frank H. Jump
It’s the day after my fiftieth birthday and I decided to give myself a long awaited treat. Ever since I saw the new “pan-Asian” restaurant storefront pop up on the ever-changing Ditmas Park landscape, I’ve wanted to pop in – but never found the right moment – plus I live with a bit of a picky eater whose tastes are somewhat broader than the average diner, but still limited when it comes to Southeast Asian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Filipino cuisine. So I’m alone on a rainy afternoon and decided to give myself a little birthday present.
Purple Yam - 1314 Cortelyou Road, Brooklyn - 718.940.8188 - © Frank H. Jump
The Purple Yam on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park is an exciting addition to the growing choices of places to dine out in our little corner of Brooklyn. If you would have told me ten years that a casual pan-Asian restaurant with a Filipino based menu would be opening up within walking distance of the Cortelyou Road stop on the N train – I would have said “Get out!”
Granted, Filipino and Indonesian cuisines have had a hard time making a foothold on the East Coast in general – when only twenty years ago did Thai, Malaysian and Vietnamese cuisines begin to become mainstays in Asian dining in Brooklyn. West Coasters have long appreciated “alternative” Asian cuisines, compared to the standard fare that was offered for decades by Americanized Mandarin and Szechuan restauranteurs here in the Tri-State area. But I’m glad to see there is finally a market for a more daring, less cliché Asian fare in our neighborhood.
Purple Yam - 1314 Cortelyou Road, Brooklyn - 718.940.8188 - © Frank H. Jump
For brunch, I enjoyed the Fresh Lumpia with peanut and tamarind sauce as a starter. I requested some sambal (a hot chili paste condiment) with my appetizer and it looked as if the charming and eloquent chef Romy Dorotan (Romy and partner chef Amy Besa – formerly from Cendrillon in Soho) had whipped it up from scratch. As a main course I had a noodle dish – Pancit Luglug – thick rice noodles with ground pork and shrimp in a delicate but well-spiced sauce. So delicious. For dessert, I had the special Filipino lime meringue pie with a scoop of guava ice-cream and a raspberry sauce. Magnificent!
Purple Yam - 1314 Cortelyou Road, Brooklyn - 718.940.8188 - © Frank H. Jump
Don’t wait for a rainy day to go to the Purple Yam! Support local businesses now.
Reviews:
- New York Magazine – August 2009
- New York Times – December 2009
- Time Out NYC – January 2010
Purple Yam website:
- Purple Yam – BRUNCH MENU (Sat & Sun from 12N – 3:30PM) – DINNER MENU
March 13, 2010 11:37:38 PM EST –
Dear Frank:
This is such wonderful feedback and a great story at that. Love it! Thank you so much for sharing your experience with your readers. We actually prefer these unpredictable results than formal reviews. They are so honest and surprising.
Thank you so much and hope to see you again!
Amy & Romy
Autumn Pocono Toadstool – Paddenstoel
Taken with iPhone © Frank H. Jump
Taken with iPhone © Frank H. Jump
Sometimes the iPhone camera surprises me.
The terms “Mushroom” and “Toadstool” go back centuries and were never precisely defined, nor was there consensus on application.
The term “toadstool” was often, but not exclusively, applied to poisonous mushrooms or to those that have the classic umbrella-like cap-and-stem form. Between 1400 and 1600 A.D., the terms tadstoles, frogstooles, frogge stoles, tadstooles, tode stoles, toodys hatte, paddockstool, puddockstool, paddocstol, toadstoole, and paddockstooles sometimes were used synonymously with mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns.
The word has apparent analogies in Dutch padde(n)stoel (toad-stool/chair, mushroom) and German Krötenschwamm (toad-fungus, alt. word for panther cap). Others have proposed a connection with German “Todesstuhl” (lit. “death’s chair”). Since Tod is a direct cognate to death, in that case it would be a German borrowing. – Wikipedia
