The best oatmeal cookie that isn't an oatmeal cookie

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The thin, chewy, gooey, hazelnutty oatmeal cookie at the Nordic Bakery would be the best oatmeal cookie in London were it not for one simple fact: this is no oatmeal cookie.

I can understand their wanting to name the cookie after its healthiest, cholesterol-battling, fibre-rich ingredient. It's good branding, isn't it?

But sorry guys: this is at best a butter cookie. You could use crumbs of it to grease a skillet and fry fish fillets, that's how much butter is in that cookie.

two london pizzas: same mozza, different results

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Franca Manca and Organic Pizza Company both get their mozzarella from Alham Wood Organics in Somerset (UK), only they cut it differently to achieve dissimilar results. Can you tell how each was cut? Can you guess which is which and how each was cut? Which looks better? For discussion purposes we will call the top/first picture of a Margherita pizza "A" and the bottom/second one "B"

What happens when you remove the cake from cupcake?

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It had to happen: The demand for more and still more icing and less and still less cake has led Butter Lane, a cupcake boutique in New York's East Village, to serve $1 icing shots in the small paper serving cups ordinarily used for ketchup or mustard. Sadly and predictably, Butter Lane is not alone in this endeavor. Icing or frosting shots are particularly popular in Southern California (why doesn't that surprise me?) at such cupcakeries (that word is not my invention, google "cupcakery" if you don't believe me) as Point Loma in San Diego and Frostings in Lake Forest.

My beef with the macarons at McDonald's in France

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If, as Mike Steinberger writes in "How McDonald's Conquered France", McDonald's France gets its macarons from the company that owns Ladurée, then it shouldn't come as a big surprise that they're pretty good. The gumminess in the ones I tried on a Sunday night probably had more to do with freshness than the quality of the pistachio, lemon, vanilla, raspberry and chocolate macarons. The flavours are true, if not stellar. At 90 cents apiece they are clearly a bargain.

Furthermore, macarons are a natural brand extension for McDonald's. They resemble mini-hamburgers in Technicolor.

My only big disappointment? That McDo (pronounced "mack-doh"), as the fastfood chain is known in France, did not rebrand them as "McCarons"