Soho to Penn Station

Viviane suggested that I blog this information, so here goes. She wanted to know how to get from our office at Broadway and Houston to Penn Station, buy a NJT ticket, and get on her train. I've optimized this route to pieces, so here it is.

1. enter the Broadway Lafayette station at Broadway and Houston
2. Go all the way down the first set of stairs past the turnstile to the BDFV Uptown platform. wait just behind the stairs
3. Get on the first train that comes and go 1 stop to West 4th
   
4. When you exit at West 4th, the escalator that skips the mezzanine is right there. Get on it and go to the ACE Uptown platform
5. walk down to the other end of the platform. take a C or E train.
6. exit at 34th Street/Penn. you will be very close to the turnstiles, go out them and down the half flight of stairs
7. you're now on the lower level of NYP Station. Walk straight ahead, and take the first corridor that goes off to the right. That corridor starts off with LIRR tracks, and the NJT tracks are at the far end
8. Near track 6ish or 4ish, there's a set of ticket machines that will rarely have a line. Buy your ticket there.
9. There are NJT monitors nearby- watch them for your train. You will see the track announced 10 minutes before it will leave NYP

I've been missing Dahlia Bakery and Macrina incredibly. There are some nice bakeries in NYC, but I got terribly attached to both of those places in Seattle, so nothing here is stacking up. To console my sweettooth, I recently bought Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America, which is an awesome baking cookbook. It has little sections on various dessert types, and each opens with some notes on technique. So far I've figured out how to make these:

• sabayon (yum!)
• chocolate sabayon torte
• truffles
• buttercream cake
• sponge cake
• lemon buttermilk cake
• Raspberry coulis sauce

I've made a few other recipes, but I haven't exactly mastered them yet... created mushy messes would be more like it. One important recent discovery: the kitchenaid whisk mixer is a necessity for sponge cake, just as the recipe says. Fail to use it, and you will end up with something that falls in on itself.