pro tip: jelly anything is really hard to photograph

This is a Hanukkah-only Robicellis cupcake called – wait for it! – The Blatt! It’s only available this week, and then goes into the “vault”, Disney movie style, until Hanukkah 2011.

It’s a cupcake homage to the jelly donuts or sufganiyot that are eaten during the holiday. The description is: vanilla cake topped with cheesecake buttercream, raspberry jam and crumbled fried cookie pieces. Sounds pretty excellent, right?

They’re delicious (you can never really go wrong with a Robicellis).

When I found out about The Blatt on Twitter a few days ago, I immediately called Matt all weepy because I was SO touched they’d thought of Rob and me. This was on the heels of them writing this on Thanksgiving, which already had me farklempt. He made fun of me for crying, but then went on to get all mushy himself about how we were so supportive throughout the year – I had them on Hey Brooklyn and we tried to show up for lots of events they were selling at – and how much that meant to them, and then HE got choked up!

People, my friends are rad.

Want one? Here’s a list of where in NYC they’re available. If you want a whole bunch as a special order, you can call them at 917.509.6048 or email info@robicellis.com

In Brooklyn:

HOM- 88th St and 3rd Ave, Bay Ridge

CAFE AT SAM’S BAKERY- 94th Street off 3rd Ave, Bay Ridge

BLUE APRON FOODS- Union St. off 7th Ave, Park Slope

CAFE 474- 4th Ave off 11th St, Park Slope

CRESPELLA CREPE & ESPRESSO BAR- 321 7th Avenue at 9th Street, Park Slope

MARKET- Cortelyou Road btwn Westminster & Argyle, Ditmas Park

FLYING SAUCER CAFE- Atlantic Ave. btwn 3rd Ave & Nevins Street, Boerum Hill

FARMACY- Corner of Henry and Sackett, Carroll Gardens

RADISH- Bedford Ave off N8th, Williamsburg

TAZZA CAFES- Henry off Atlantic and Clark off Henry, Brooklyn Heights

And in Manhattan:

CAKESHOP- Ludlow btwn Stanton & Rivington, Lower East Side

LILY O’BRIEN’S AT BRYANT PARK- E40th btwn 5th and 6th, Midtown

Really quick post – I am so excited to announce that today is the first week of me being regularly featured on the Skint each Monday! The Skint is a daily listing of free and cheap things to buy, see, do and eat in New York, and I’m spicing it up with a link to my weekly Hey Brooklyn interviews. Here is the first one!

This connection is excellent for me because they’re a great website – I’ve turned to them often when figuring out weekend plans – and they have a wide readership, so more eyeballs on me! You know I’m such an attention hog.

Remember that time I said I was going to blog every week about who was on Hey Brooklyn that Friday? Yeah, I kind of forgot. Here’s the makeup post.

Hey BK 28 was awesome. Cathy Erway has a radio show called Cheap Date on the Heritage Radio Network and she writes about not eating out in New York. I met her while selling cupcakes at the Brooklyn Flea for Cupcakes Take the Cake‘s charity bake sale. Nichelle introduced us and I emailed her almost immediately. (Look at me, networking at charity events. I’m so NYC I can’t stand it.)

Hey BK 29 was also awesome. I don’t remember how I met Fiona Bloom; I think Rob knew her first and hooked us up via Twitter. Her career is really interesting, but honestly I could listen to her pontificate on different colors of dryer lint and find her just as fascinating. She’s one of those people… you have to listen to know what I’m talking about. After her interview I wanted to go forth and take over the world. In our post-interview photo session we were looking for somewhere creative to shoot her portrait and she climbed up on the railing of the loading dock at the studio like a gymnast. Definitely a grab life by the nards kind of girl. I mean that in the nicest way.

Hey BK 30* is the most recent episode. David Wingo is a chill dude with a gorgeous voice (and rockin’ beard!). He brought both a guitar and a banjo to the studio and played a tambourine with his foot which I thought was really cool, but he shrugged off. Musicians, I guess, can’t appreciate how deeply awesome every musical thing they do is.

When it’s time to do the music portion of an interview we take a few minutes and Rob adjusts the microphones to get the sound just right, and then he’ll ask the musician to play a few chords into the mic to check the sound levels. They do and boom! this MAGIC comes out of the guitar and they’re not blown away by it AT ALL and I always want to yell, “You’re WASTING IT on SOUND CHECK!” and also, “Why are you not freaking out that you can make this beautiful sound with your hands?!” but it’s just always… there, you know, and it’s not magic to them it’s, like, breathing. And every time I get all choked up. God help me if someone walks into the studio with a ukulele.

Anyway, David’s PR company sent me an advance copy of the CD (wtf? who says things like that? me.) and it is fantastic. It’s called Belly of the Lion, and you can buy it here. The most recent film he composed for is called Gentlemen Broncos and is in theaters now.

And now I am all caught up!

*omg. 30!

Amy was really fun to talk to, and her book is cool; it’s a collection of Taxi Cab stories from the 1970′s through today, and a lot of them are really compelling. You can listen to our interview here and buy her book here.

My blog was down for a bit, so I’m late posting about my awesome interview with Erica from Fucked in Park Slope, which you can hear here.

I was aware of her blog for ages, but I didn’t meet her until we were both guests at a Shabbat dinner. After that, Rob and I both became good friends with her (and interviewing friends is such a delicious treat for me!) so we had a time in the studio.

I spaced on taking a photo of her (life is hard, yo, and I can’t keep on top of everything!) plus we interviewed at night and I like to take my photos outside, so she sent me a cute photo of her at her wedding. I love the sleeved gown!

Here, because I still don’t have a photo of her, I used a photo of Oliver, her dog. He’s cute.

I let Dan do the intro, a Hey Brooklyn first! We were in the studio goofing off for a while and he tried to imitate me. I don’t think he nailed it, but he made me laugh.

He has a podcast called VendrTV where he hops around the country interviewing food cart proprietors. I’m jealous. What he does is similar to what I do in terms of interviewing people with interesting stories, but he does it on camera, and he set his show up so he can travel to places. I, of course, focused on the local scene, and now I never get to go on planes. Live and learn. My next podcast is going to be called Hey Tropical Islands.

Go here to listen to the show and visit vendr.tv for the show’s site.

This is Rachel Lee Walsh. She’s pretty awesome.

This was the first time it occurred to me to snap photos of our studio. Rob likes to have the microphones just so, and you can tell in the sound quality of my final project. If you need a sound engineer in Brooklyn you should hire him and pay him lots of money. He’s worth it.

Rachel and he were scheming to play together, because she noticed his upright base in the corner of our sound booth and found out that he used to play blue grass. She has a country/folk/blues kind of thing going on. I think they’d rock together.

At one point in the interview I say to her, “Oh, you are of my people” which is a weird thing to say, I know, but the way she writes songs is from the perspective of wanting to tell a human story, and this is the way I do my podcast. Her writing is both clever and simple.

This is Rachel’s guitar strap, and I think it’s SO cool. It’s from Kelly Horrigan.

To listen to our interview, go to the interview page at HeyBrooklyn.com or type Hey Brooklyn into iTunes.

Anna Jane was fun to interview, and it was great to have a woman on the show after a long string of manly guests. We giggled our way through a lot of it, and I imagined Rob on the other side of the booth wall getting really uncomfortable; we were talking about “body hair” and “waxing down there”. Good stuff.

Her new book, Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By is awesome. It’s a book of things that are becoming obsolete but we can still find and can definitely still remember. In the interview she says that she wrote it for herself – it’s not covered wagons or butter churns that she’s talking about, it’s stuff from our early 80′s childhood: answering machines, rotary phones, Polaroid pictures*, mini discs, and boomboxes. Since she and I are about the same age, it rang all the same bells for me, too.

Anna Jane has a contest going on on her Obsolete Blog:

Every day [until September 21], I’ll be accepting submissions…: photos, videos, short essays, audio clips, etc. Each day, the best submissions will be featured [the Obsolete Blog]; each day’s winning entrant will receive a free signed copy of OBSOLETE.

To enter, please email me your submission to ObsoleteTheBook@gmail.com or use the form [on the blog]. Make sure to include your email address so that I can contact you if you win.

But wait! There’s more! If you are a TUMBLR or FACEBOOK or TWITTER user and you reblog or mention this post, you will receive a little token of my appreciation. For free! Via mail! Old school, right? All you have to do is email me a link to the reblogged post, or a screen shot, and your mailing address.

*I can’t possibly the only person in the world who says “Polaroid picture” and then has to think, “Shake it, uh, uh, uh! Shake it! Hey ya! Shake it like a Polaroid picture!”

Sean Kershaw of Sean Kershaw and the New Jack Ramblers

Go here to listen, or download the show on iTunes by typing in “Hey Brooklyn”.

It was a fun sight to see a man on a bike in a cowboy hat riding to the studio! In this episode, Sean told me that every Wednesday this month, he and his band are going to be playing at Hill Country in Manhattan. Hill Country is authentic Texas BBQ, and that’s pretty much all you need to say to get me to show up with my bib on. Especially if there’s beer, too.

The music at the end of this podcast is hilarious; it includes what is probably “the only country song written about Brooklyn”.

Thanks, Sean, for a great interview!

(Rob pointed out to me that I should be cross-posting my weekly episodes of Hey Brooklyn here on the blog, so I’ll be doing that every Monday from here on out.  I might as well, there are all these “tidbits” and little funny things that happen when I’m recording these that just don’t make it into the interview because of time restraints, and now I can share them all here.)