Damn you Dessert Truck.

Not only have you infiltrated my evening stomping grounds in the East Village, as well as my work-days in Midtown, but just as I was growing immune to the lure of your chocolate bread pudding you’ve unleashed something even more irresistible.

Like the creamiest of pie fillings topped with toasted marshmallows and crunchy sugar-roasted pecans, this pumpkin custard is the perfect autumn snack. It’s a good thing it’s jacket season too because soon I might need to camouflage my many, many indulgences in this treat.

I promise to shut up about Dessert Truck now.

Dessert Truck - Park Ave and 52nd St. Mon-Fri 12pm-4pm and on Third Ave and St. Mark’s every day 6pm-midnight

Fans of Magnolia Bakery’s famously sweet cupcakes, rejoice. Now you no longer need to schlep downtown for a dose of that toothache-inducing buttercream frosting. Magnolia has just opened an under-the-radar outpost (no signage yet?) on the corner of 49th street and 6th avenue–tourist central and spitting distance from about a million snackish office workers.

There’s a bit more selection here than I remember in the West Village location, and I’ll probably check out the promising-looking cheesecake, cookies, and various other treats when I’m craving something sweet. My peanut butter bar with heath candy bar crumbled on top ($2.50) was a delightful, if intense, post-lunch pick-me-up. But unsurprisingly, all the action here is around the cupcake window. I have to be honest: I never understood what made these cupcakes so damn special, besides the shout-out on Sex in the City, but at least here they are behind a pane of glass. In the downtown location, shoppers graze their coat-sleeves through frosting as they serve themselves in a kind of dog-eat-dog cupcake frenzy. Also, there wasn’t a line out the door in the 49th street spot–not yet, anyway. I think that is what bothered me about Magnolia in the West Village; not that people were eating those cupcakes, but that they would stand in a line wrapped around the block for half an hour in the freezing cold to eat those cupcakes. I was fooled once; I got in the line, thinking there might be something unbelievably delicious hidden under all that pastel frosting; there wasn’t. It was a cupcake, no more, no less. Needless to say, I haven’t recovered from my disappointment.

Magnolia Bakery 1240 Sixth Avenue, at 49th Street

Ya know, I’d long been wishing that Dessert Truck, my favorite mobile dessert concept, would pull up the stakes and cruise on over to the East Side. Just last week the Dessert Truck sent out an alert to their Facebook fans saying that because there’s reduced foot traffic on University Place since NYU closed for summer, they’ll now be parked on Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place.

Yessss. Now not only is the truck convenient to me, and the subway (and who doesn’t have to ride the 6 train at some point), but it’s joining a little snack-peddling caravan in Astor Place, including the Mud Truck, Mr. Softee, and the Wafels & Dinges truck - which is usually up on 14th street but two recent sightings near the Cube point to a possible new locale Update: The waffle truck parked at Astor Place is not Wafels & Dinges. It is a knockoff Wafels & Dinges.

The downside–Astor Place sucks to hang out in, unless you’re skateboarding, playing a saxophone, or selling glass bubblers (nymag.com’s has an article about the total mish-mash that the public space around Cooper Union has become). Your best bet if you’d like to sit and snack might be to find a quiet stoop on 9th or 10th street, or meander up Stuyvensant Street to St. Mark’s Church.

Original Snackish post about Dessert Truck

Dessert Truck, Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place, 6pm-12am, every day (except when it rains, usually)

Doughnut Plant is probably the only eating establishment I have visited twice in one day. It’s that good.

First, there are the yeast donuts, in glazed, jelly-filled, and creme-filled varieties. They’re squarish, faced-sized and unbelievably light, with airy, melty dough under a sticky layer of sweet glaze ($2). Perennial faves are vanilla bean, Vahlrona chocolate (messy), and peanut butter and jelly. There’s a rainbow of seasonal flavors too, including fresh strawberry, pomegranate, pumpkin, and banana pecan. Vanilla is simplicity perfected if you usually find donuts too sweet or too fried. Often there’s one fresh from the oven on a baking sheet poking through the kitchen window, and they’ll drop that one in your bag instead of the one on display in the shelves.

Then there are the cake donuts–smaller, round with a hole, with a more condensed, doughier middle; a closer relative to the traditional donut (think Krispy Kreme). Tres Leches ($2) has a ring of sweet custard running through it–a phenomenal improvement over Boston Creme, because you get just a little bit of creme with every bite. If you must try only one donut here, get this one.

There are the cinnamon rolls, huge doughy spirals encased in a crackling glaze, spiked with swollen raisins, and cinnamon-sugary filling growing more concentrated as you eat your way into its sticky heart.

And finally there’s the dude behind the counter, who is pretty much the embodiment of the happy gourmand donut shopping vibe. He’s always smiling. I love buying donuts from that guy.

There’s only a couple of seats, so count on getting your donuts to go, and munching your way down Grand Street. Plan to get an extra one, so you don’t have to make that second trip.

Doughnut Plant, 379 Grand Street (also sold at Dean & Deluca, but best to go to the source)
Tues-Sun 6:30 am - 6:30 pm

I never tasted a bialy before I lived in New York City. Even in New York these cousins to the more-mainstream bagel are hard to come by. Try to find a good one and most likely, you’ll end up standing at a certain spot on Grand Street, where trendy Lower East Side melds with Chinatown and overlooks a grim shoreline of projects. Here stands Kossar’s Bialys, the remaining stronghold of downtown’s vanished bialy-baking industry.

Inside it seems like little has changed since they opened seventy years ago. Behind a simple counter stand a few wire racks piled with warm bialys, bagels and bulkas. Across a powdery floor, trays of dough placed in tall racks await their turn in the brick oven, whose depths are plumbed by a lone baker with a pole. Seating consists of a bench outside, with an old guy already sitting on it.

But atmosphere isn’t the point–this place is all about bialys. While bagels are boiled rior to baking, rendering their crusts hard and shiny and their innards dense, bialys are simply baked, leaving them lighter and airier, but still chewy and delicious. Instead of a center hole they have a dimple filled with sweet chopped onion. Kossar’s doesn’t toast, so if you do some at home you’ll find even more flavor unleashed, especially with a thin layer of cream cheese or butter spread over top. If you haven’t been for a while, steel yourself for sticker shock–the price of a bilay has skyrocketed from sixty to ninety cents since the halcyon days of 2006. Don’t tell them but I’d probably pay more.

Snack spots, even good ones, come and go quickly in this hood, and I don’t tend to get too attached (witness, if you will, the Chase Bank that was once the venerable Second Avenue Deli). Although the reflex sentiment toward gentrification is dismay, I don’t think shrugging off the past is necessarily a bad thing (now scheduled for demolition/cries of protest–the funeral pyre-ish tower of bedraggled toys on Sixth Street and Avenue B–good fucking riddance). But, ye Manhattan gods! Leave us Kossar’s Bialys! Someone make this a designated landmark of snack before it’s too late!

(shot of the Tower of Toys on East Sixth Street)

Kossar’s Bialys 367 Grand Street at Essex Street. Open 24 Hours Sun-Fri. Closes Fri at sundown. Closed Saturday. REPEAT: Closed Saturday!! If you forget and head down on a Saturday, don’t worry. Donut Plant is a couple doors down, and is worth a visit.