Pink Radio Cake
Fido, $4.25
A beet bonanza several years ago led Fido's pastry chef to experiment with using beet puree to add subtle flavor and not-so-subtle color to the coffeeshop's standard cake recipe. The resulting "pink radio cake" is sort of a dialed-down red velvet: cake moistened with buttermilk, oil, and vinegar and held together with cream cheese icing the color of a Barbie birthday party.
Judging from other pictures I've seen online, some batches are definitely beetier than others, with one or more of the cake layers looking like a wedge of rouge. Maybe it's a seasonal thing?
Nostalgic old-Nashville aside: I can so clearly remember the building's previous life as Jones' Pet Shop, where the puppies in their tiny cages were both adorable and pitiful, impossible not to look at.
Fido
1812 21st Ave S
Nashville TN
615/777-3436
Colt's Bolts
Nashville Airport, $1.99
On the one hand, a Colt's Bolt is a dressed-up Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; on the other, it's a country song wrapped in foil.
On the label of each confection is a 1980's glamor shot of blonde in a red power suit, company owner Mackenzie Colt. A teenage wife and mother with talent and ambition, Colt was a regular at open mic nights at the Ramada Inn lounge near her St. Louis home, where she was discovered by Buck Owens. After touring as Owens' protege, she moved to Nashville for a six-season stint as a scantily-clad "Hee Haw Honey."
When she aged out of her Hee Haw role, Colt had a Plan C waiting in the wings: a lifelong passion for baking and confectionery. In 1984 she began to combine chocolate, peanut butter, and roasted almonds into candy cups she called Colt's Bolts. At first she mixed all of the ingredients in her own Cuisinart and wrapped the finished cups in the foil left over from chocolate bars she melted down for her coating. All that had to change after Colt's Bolts won the Fancy Food Show's Outstanding Confection Award and a Japanese distributor ordered 60,000 pieces.
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
3-scoop cup, $5.50
On at least a hundred occasions I've filled a Baskin-Robbins' cup with one of the clashing-est combinations possible: one scoop of peanut-butter-chocolate AND one of daquiri ice. And never has a B-R server paused and gently suggested to me that perhaps the flavors I'd requested might not pair very well together. I had to go to Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams for that.
I first had Jeni's several years ago at the original location in the Columbus, Ohio covered market and quickly decided that a second serving would justify a return trip to Ohio. Since then the business has boomed and you can now find Jeni's outlets sprinkled around the Southeast.
The lines are long and slow, but even so the servers patiently encourage careful decision making and thorough sampling. Before coming in I'd read the profiles of all of the current flavors online and made a plan, but I still sampled almost everything--you know, just to be sure.
My first choice was Yazoo Sue with rosemary bar nuts: "Built from the ground up with a creamy, rich, and mellow cherry wood-smoked porter (by Nashville's Yazoo Brewing Company) and fistfuls of savory 'bar nuts'—peanuts, pecans, and almonds dusted with rosemary, brown sugar, and cayenne." Second, Black Coffee: "We steep Batdorf & Bronson's single-estate coffee right in the cream (rather than in water). Our process yields coffee ice cream that tastes as delicious as a cup of intensely flavorful coffee smells."
Last, I shoehorned in the flavor that my concerned server suggested might not play well with the others, Cherry Lambic Sorbet: "If your memory says, 'Skip it because it’s gonna taste like artificial, super-sweet cherry flavoring,' don’t trust your memory. In fact, our Cherry Lambic sorbet won the Gallo Family Vineyards award in 2008. We used the money we won from this award to begin direct-sourcing vanilla beans and pure vanilla extract from Ndali Estate in Uganda."
When I wouldn't budge, we came up with a compromise: my server used waffle cookies to craft a dam between the creamy flavors and the tart one.
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
1892 Eastland Avenue
Nashville TN
615/262-8611
Coffee Soda
Crema Coffee
I've always loved the idea of coffee-flavored soda but had yet to drink one that matched up with the nectar of my imagination. Then came Crema. Their coffee soda blows my expectations out of the water, in large part because it's not coffee-flavored, but actual coffee that they carbonate to order. A rotating selection of cold-brews get poured into some kind of Rube Goldberg carbonating contraption that requires a (trainee?) barista to shake it vigorously for several minutes. To that they add ice, mellow demerara simple syrup, and a zippy little twist of orange zest. Bring on the 100% humidity!
Crema Coffee
15 Hermitage Ave
Nashville, TN
615/255-8311
