E. Dwass

New in the freezer

With summer weather on the way, grocery freezer cases have some new dessert choices to help us chill. In April, Haagen-Dazs began marketing a line of gelato. And Ben & Jerry's just added three more flavors to its selection of frozen Greek yogurt, which was introduced last year.

The gelato comes in black cherry amaretto, cappuccino, dark chocolate chip, limoncello, sea salt caramel, vanilla bean and stracciatella.

Ben & Jerry's latest Greek yogurt flavors are Liz Lemon, pineapple passionfruit and vanilla honey caramel. These share freezer space with banana peanut butter, blueberry vanilla graham, raspberry fudge chunk and strawberry shortcake.

Both Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's are tapping into very hot food trends (of the cold variety). "It's a great time to be launching gelato now," Cady Behles, Haagen-Dazs brand manager, told Squid Ink.

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Flickr/Christian Cable

Twinkies live!

The report of the demise of that golden sponge cake with the creamy filling may have been premature. Twinkies and their Hostess snack brethren could be back by as soon as this summer. Two private equity firms have bought the iconic brands for $410 million, CNN reports.

There were no other qualified bids for the bankrupt company's brands, so the $410 million offer won by default, with no further approval of the court required.

Anthony Michael Sabino, a business school professor at St. John's University, told CNN, "The good news is a significant amount of money to pay Hostess' creditors. The great news, Twinkies have been saved!"

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Christine Chiao

Bread pudding at Ramekin

Soft-launched on Feb. 23, Ramekin has opened its double glass doors to the public -- with most of its many desserts served in, you guessed it, ramekins.

Paul Yoo and Jason Park's menu of ice cream, sorbets, and baked-to-order desserts are made in-house, from as many organic, local and non-GMO ingredients as possible.

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S. Bonar

Scads of homemade Valentine's Day candies at Little Flower Candy Co.

You've heard of "Pay it don't say it"? This year, how about applying that principle to Valentine's Day goodies? If you really love your significant other, surely you can afford to spend several hundred dollars on chocolates or a fancy cake? Look at it this way: It's way cheaper than an engagement ring!

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S. Bonar

A sweet Mars rover

One giant leap for a pastry chef? We've seen a lot of cool gingerbread houses around town, but nothing tops the gingerbread Mars Curiosity rover that the nerdy minds at Caltech have come up with. Crafted by Kevin Isacsson, head chef of the Athaneum, the Pasadena university's private dining club, the rover features pinwheel cookie wheels connected with black licorice, sugared Lego "gears" and gumdrop and M&M "buttons."

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A. Scattergood

sugar cookies at Bittersweet Treats

Pasadena, once the closest thing L.A. had to a food desert, finally is going through something of a renaissance. With the recent additions of Umami Burger and Float, there's also a lovely new dessert shop. Danielle Keene and business partner Linda Chen quietly opened Bittersweet Treats last Tuesday.

Keene, whose credits include pastry chef at Wilshire, Little Door and BLT Steak and a stint on Top Chef: Just Desserts, has had an online business, also called Bittersweet Treats, where folks could order her stellar cakes, pies, cookies and pastries. But now there's a retail shop to go with the business, which Keene has moved into the East Colorado Boulevard location.

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Anne Fishbein

Mozza's butterscotch budino at the 2012 Gold Standard

Celebrating this year's Best of L.A. issue -- now out in print and online -- we're counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes.

4: Butterscotch Budino at Mozza.

There are many, many reasons to spend time at the glorious food complex that is Mozza on the corner of Melrose and Highland. The fennel sausage pizza. The porchetta (!). Salumi Thursdays. The pizza classes. The myriad bowls of pasta at the Osteria. The many incarnations of the stunning gelato. The gingerbread pigs. (One could go on.) But maybe the best dish on the menu, or at least the one that would engender the most uproar if it was ever removed, is the butterscotch budino. Pastry chef Dahlia Narvaez's dessert is neither ground-breaking nor anything assembled from foams or wacky foodist techniques. Basically it's just a butterscotch pudding, albeit an extraordinary one.

In Narvaez's hands, the pudding -- which at Mozza goes by the appropriately Italian name of budino -- is more a study in caramel than it is an ordinary pudding. Topped with a thick strata of salted caramel and a spoonful of whipped crème fraîche, the dish also comes with a few rosemary-pine nut cornmeal cookies. Again, both a simple cookie and far more than the sum of its parts.

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A. Scattergood

sugar and spice beignets at Hatfield's

11. Sugar and Spice Beignets at Hatfield's.

There are myriad glorious things to find at Hatfield's, Quinn and Karen Hatfield's lovely study in elegance and culinary atavism in what was once Michel Richard's Citrus. There is the open kitchen, in which you can see the chefs in their toques (hence atavistic) cooking your dinner. There are the gorgeous plates that Quinn Hatfield constructs: the beet-cured fluke strewn like magenta ribbons across buckwheat crisps, or the charred Spanish octopus that comes nestled among paprika-spiked potatoes, or the 36-hour braised "pastrami," which is as like pastrami as it is not.

And then there are Karen Hatfield's desserts, which are reason enough to make reservations. Of the many you could order, the one that has been a fixture both at this incarnation of Hatfield's, and the former iteration on Beverly -- as well as, before that, at their restaurant Cortez in San Francisco -- are the beignets, remarkably light pillows of fried dough that come dusted with crystalized sugar rather than the more traditional powdered and rest on the plate like particularly beautiful geometry.

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Limer35

Cake #8: Latte French Cake from JJ Bakery

Birthday countdowns are nothing new for West Covina resident Remil Mangali. For his 40th birthday, Mangali ate one birthday cake daily for 40 days.

Mangali turned 41 on November 15. But this year, he simply didn't have enough time to do a daily countdown.

So he did an hourly one.

"I did it last year with 40 days of cake. This year I was so busy that I totally forgot about it," he said, "So the only option I had was 41 hours of cake."

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A. Scattergood

Spago's baked Jonagold apple

Celebrating this year's Best of L.A. issue -- now out in print and online -- we're counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes.

14. Spago's Baked Jonagold Apple.

When Spago closed its Beverly Hills doors over the summer, for a $4 million overhaul, it was not simply for a bit of fresh paint. Wolfgang Puck and his crew, many of whom have been with the Austrian-born chef for well over a decade and in some cases closer to two, were busy in the restaurant's giant kitchen -- the view of which now opened up by huge glass doors -- completely overhauling the menu while the dining room was getting a pretty swank redesign. And while Puck, executive chef Lee Hefter and Spago chef de cuisine Tetsu Yahagi were playing with the savory side of the menu, longtime Spago pastry chef Sherry Yard was maybe having even more fun.

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