Winter Wonderwhirling: Day 5 (Boston)
Swedish Pastries, old friends, and the train to Boston!
Fabrique Bakery, NYC — “I’d like one of each, please!”
My nose was pressed up so close to the pastry display case that it was almost touching. The scent of buttered cardamom circled the whole block. I was glad to be wearing a mask that would conceal any refractory drooling. The counter person sized me up as I handed him the Hazella company credit card.
“You gonna eat all these yourself?” He asked me.
“It’s research,” I nodded, with the astuteness of a proper scientist. I gathered up my little parcel of Swedish knots like precious beakers and found a table.
Cardamom, Saffron, and Saffron Raisin Knots from Fabrique Bakery.
Many people reading this will know that my family owns a Northern-European bake shop in Oregon. I work there part-time and one of our biggest sellers is their Swedish cardamom knots. We couldn’t convince the accountant to write my whole trip off, but a perk of working in the restaurant industry is writing off some dang good food as "research." This theme became the unofficial mission of my trip… and every other trip I’ve been on since we opened Hazella Bake Shop in 2020.
Like any good research scientist, I spread my hoard of little pastries out on the table to analyze their form. Before embarking on the taste test, you must first analyze the other senses.
What does it look like? How did they shape it? In what order was it assembled? What tools did they use?
What does it smell like? What flavors should I expect? What quality of ingredients may have been used? What type of leavening was likely used?
What does it sound like? This may seem like an odd question in association with food, but listening to a piece break off can tell you a lot about the texture and how it was made.
What does it feel like? Mouthfeel is incredibly important with food, and if it’s finger food like a pastry it’s good to know what your customers are grabbing ahold of.
You can’t get a good sense of #4 without diving into taste so I took the small piece of cardamom braid I’d torn off for #3 and put it in my mouth.
5. What does it taste like? For taste, you have to let it sit on your tongue for a moment. I like the bread to start to dissolve with the butter on my tongue before swirling it around to the sweet, salty, and sour areas of the mouth while taking note of the texture.
Research is hard work, eh?
Julia, outside Fabrique Bakery
I resisted the urge to eat any more until my friends arrived.
Julia and Tiffany are both friends that I met at fashion school in my first week of classes. Our first outing was a trip to the MoMa and then down to Coney Island, which couldn’t be a better way to start a friendship.
Tiffany was in my sewing class. She had never used a sewing machine and already in the first week, she had mastered sewing better than I had come to do in over ten years of experience. She finished first in every class and her stitching was immaculate. Instant respect in my books.
Julia on the other hand was an artistic genius to which I had no experience to compare. Her first drawings in our illustration classes were more beautiful than those of my professor’s. Her lines are so fine, yet confident that she can convey an entire story in the flick of a wrist.
Both girls came to Oregon to visit me after my accident — the first friends I was able to see for an entire year. Their visit to an unknown place to see a slightly more than decomposed Katherine was one of the most moving gestures anyone has made for me and it gave me so much encouragement to see them in those times when I was struggling. My mom and I took them to our family farm where they met Kenyon, the 92 resident cowboy, who gave them a riding lesson. Tiffany wore red suede boots and a Juicy Couture jacket for the occasion and was a natural. That night we went into the hills where we saw the entire milky way sparkling in a moonless sky. Having spent her life in NYC, Tiffany had never seen stars before and Julia hadn’t seen them since she was home in Taiwan. We were about to head back to the house when a ring of red started to come over the horizon and a massive blood moon rose into the night sky. We were all speechless at the perfect surprise.
I remembered all of these things as I sipped on my latte at the Swedish Bakery when a familiar face came into view.
“Julia!” I sprung out of my seat to greet her. We stood outside the bakery with our treats catching up until Tiffany arrived.
Julia had taken the year off from school for COVID last year and had spent the time in Taiwan, so I hadn’t seen her in two years. Tiffany came bounding up in her over-the-knee boots and pink puffy jacket. It’s always, always, pink with Tiffany.
The three of us walked down 14th street to the new park floating on the river called Little Island. I told them all about the bakery and my recent adventures with Alex during COVID. Tiffany graduated with her BA last summer. She’s been on the hunt for a fashion job, but COVID has made it challenging as canceled events=people buying fewer clothes. Julia is in her last year and has been under a lot of pressure to get the final projects done with limited resources and changing restrictions in this year of COVID. I’d seen Tiffany briefly in May when I was in NY with Alex, but it was good to have a few hours for a proper catch-up.
We ate the pastries and Tiffany and Julia, who enjoy food as much as I do, helped me analyze them.
We saved one cardamom bun for my friend, Delaney, with who I was going to stay with in Boston.
Delany’s grandma passed away this year and this will be the first Christmas without her grandma's cardamom buns, so I was thankful for the opportunity to bring one to tide her over until she takes over the annual tradition of making the cardamom buns herself this year.
When noon came it was time for me to say goodbye to the girls and head to Penn Station to catch the train for Boston. The more time that passes without changing our relationships, the easier goodbye comes. Tiffany and Julia are the types of friends that will simply just always be in my life. If a traumatic brain injury, being separated by three-six thousand miles, a global pandemic, marriage on my end, and the natural changes that come with growing up haven't changed anything then I don’t think we have anything to worry about.
I caught my train after a little ticket drama. I'd accidentally purchased a ticket for the next Friday. While I’d been tempted to stay another week and keep the ticket, I had just gotten all of my goodbyes out of the way and I was already excited for my Boston adventure. I paid the fee to have my ticket transferred to the correct day and boarded the Amtrak.
I had the whole row to myself on the train, so I made myself cozy with all of my snacks and reading material, but I ended up spending most of the trip with my face up against the window watching the North Eastern countryside and water pass by for five hours. I have a religious tradition of always bringing an almond croissant for the train ride, so I pulled it out of its happy little sleeve as the sunset over the ocean and licked every brick building pink.
We pulled into Boston around 5 p.m. where Delaney was already waiting for me.
View from the train outside Connecticut
I met Delaney at a vintage fair in 2017. Maby NYC shops don't have room for proper dressing rooms, so sometimes everyone shares a tiny curtained-off area. Such was the case in my "meet cute" with Delaney Byrne. She zipped me up in a vintage shop dressing room and somehow we became instant friends. It could have had something to do with the fact that she talked me into buying the maroon velvet 1940’s embroidered suit or maybe just that she is the type of person that makes friends every place she goes.
Likewise, Delaney is the sort of person who gets free food and drinks everywhere she goes.
After she picked me up at the train station, we took the subway to her place to drop my bag and get ready for her company Christmas party where there would be, in very true Delaney fashion, free food and drinks.
She told me the party was going to be at an arcade. Her company is a bio start-up working with cancer research. I had a hard time picturing a group of brilliant scientists playing pinball and eating greasy burgers at an arcade, but I can't say I've met very many scientists in my life, so who knew?
When we pulled up later to be met by a couple of bouncers I realized this was not the grimy kiddy arcade I was picturing. We climbed to the third floor where we found a sleek room the size of a school gym vibrating with house music. There was a modern fireplace and every surface was shining. We made our way past tables of people with fancy haircuts and expensive shoes to the bowling alley on the far end of the room. We found Delaney’s co-workers who were busy assigning teams for bowling.
There were no greasy burgers. Instead, there were pretty little apple and brie flatbreads and beef sliders on brioche buns. Drinks of any request could appear in an instant and my plate was replaced with a clean one between servings.
It was an ugly Christmas sweater party, so we took our time to admire everyone’s truly hideous sweaters and we voted on which one was the winner.
One of the first times I hung out with Delaney was at a vintage swing dance under the Brooklyn Bridge!
What I have yet to mention about Delaney is that she wears a 1950’s outfit under her lab coat in the bio lab every single day. I didn’t bring an ugly sweater, but I wore one of the provided Christmas tree headbands and taped a green bow to my collar. Delaney, on the other hand, who does not have anything ugly in her closet let alone her home, wore a stunning 1950’s green velvet dress that we pinned Christmas bows to.
The zipper busted right before we left for the party, but thankfully she and her roommate were experienced in this and her roommate was able to re-thread the teeth of the zipper far enough for us to get the zipper most of the way up and pin her in the rest of the way. It had been a bit of an ordeal, but Delaney looked stunning and everyone at the party enjoyed her outfit.
Delaney is almost as bad at bowling as I am (or at least she pretended to be to make me feel better) so she helped me carry part of my embarrassment. More than anything I think people got a kick out of my efforts and when I got a strike on the final bowl every single person applauded.
We all parted ways around 11 p.m. and Delaney and I poked our heads into her neighborhood speakeasy. There was going to be a 45-minute wait so we decided not to order any drinks, but it was fun to find our way through the abandoned old building and up the stairs to the elegantly modern space. There were no signs outside the door and the street was dead quiet, but the bar was crowded and everyone was laughing, telling stories, and having a marvelous time.
We got back to her apartment and I was struck for the second time that day by how similar her apartment is to mine. We have the same antique furniture, same styles of artwork on the walls, same books (even the vintage ones), right down to the same brand of shampoo in the bathroom. It was like I was coming into my own home after a week in a far city and Delaney made me feel just as welcome. I wanted to stay up and look at all of her beautiful vintage clothing and read all of the beautiful books she had in her collection that I don’t, but it was already past midnight and we had much exploring to do the following day.
Delaney took a bite of the cardamom bun and I was very pleased to hear that it was in the same ballpark as her grandmother’s.