almost happy - ode to bakeries

i'm singing along to my music, alone in my room, as i am wont to do - right now i'm singing "almost happy" by k's choice. my mood, however, is not just "almost happy;" rather, it's "rather happy." after a fairly productive day in studio, tracy, liz and i went to a korean noodle place for dinner, where i got my american chinese food fix - narrow chow foon noodles with beef and scallions. in the spirit of trying weird things (i feel i've been too safe thus far) we tried "rice glue balls," which are really the rice balls that are stuffed with black sesame paste and boiled. our rice glue balls also had a banana-vanilla custard sauce clinging to them, which made them even more delicious. whenever i eat one, the image i am holding in my mind is of the metal, black-handled pot my mother used to boil hers in, and of the pale blue porcelain bowl i would eat them from. in that memory, i'm about ten years old, nose perched on the rim of the bowl, staring at the balls of wonderfulness that i am about to eat. it's always nighttime in the winter, too.

at the "asian noodle bar" we went to, there was a sliding glass door that opened directly into the bakery next door. now, there is a paucity of bakeries in this city. they're common enough in chinatown - you would think there would be a good bakery somewhere on campus! but typical chinese bakery food is like a poor chinese imitation of an american chinese bakery, with its weird combinations of stuff on top of puff pastry and pizza dough. blech. i don't even want to know where the hot dogs came from that poke out from a twist of puff pastry. anyway, this bakery - tous les jours, a french-korean bakery chain - is shiny, clean, and though it doesn't smell quite like a bakery should (where's the yeast smell?!), it does the trick pretty well. we bought a few things for breakfast, but for the right-now-and-here, we bought a strawberry bread and a red-bean doughnut. the strawberry bread was covered with a soft strawberry-sugar streusel, and filled with a pretty decent strawberry jam. in short, for those who have gone without a bakery run in a while, it was heaven. the red-bean doughnut was a little heavy from the large amount of red bean paste, but the doughnut itself was quite wonderful - very crispy on the outside, nicely yeasted on the inside. they were quite beautiful as well.

so, you ask, what did i get for breakfast? all manners of things that aren't good for me! (if you could hear my emotions, i'd be laughing gleefully right now.) i bought a "baby face bun," which is some sort of steamed bun that may or may not be filled with cream. i also got "angel bread," which is essentially a chinese version of angel food cake (a lighter version of the bao bread), filled with raspberry jam and cream. seeing a trend here? the last thing i got was a whim, next to the cash register (duped again!) - a slice of raspberry cream cheese cake. i picked up the chocolate version and was staggered by the sheer weight of the thing - it definitely weighed more than a pound. so i bought the raspberry version because i'm afraid to try chocolate things here lest they disappoint too much with their lack of chocolate flavor. that thing might be like lead, or it might be absolutely scrumptious - we shall see. as an added bonus, i walked into my room to find that the air conditioning is working without my even asking for it to be fixed (it never worked in the first place), so i'm confident that my cream-based baked goods will survive the night and live up to their potential to make me very happy.