There is a very specific moment in New York when you realize pumpkin season has officially arrived. It might happen when the first girl in an oversized sweater walks past you carrying a chai latte. It might be the sudden appearance of cinnamon on every café menu. Or, more likely, it happens when you walk into your favorite bakery and discover that your usual order has been replaced by something orange, spiced, caramelized and aggressively seasonal.
And honestly, I am not mad about it. There is something especially fun about a dessert that exists for only a few weeks. It gives an otherwise ordinary Tuesday a little plot. You can meet a friend downtown, wander around SoHo, stop for something sweet, and suddenly you have a whole afternoon. Here are five seasonal treats worth adding to your NYC dessert rotation.
First up is Magnolia Bakery, because if there is one dessert that practically begs to be reinvented, it is banana pudding. This season, Magnolia is giving its famous pudding a pumpkin moment with Pumpkin Spice Pudding with Biscoff®, combining pumpkin spice with Biscoff cookie butter and vanilla wafers. There is also a Pumpkin Spice Banana Pudding with Biscoff®, layered with fresh bananas and Biscoff crumbs. It is creamy, cozy and just dramatic enough to justify making a special trip downtown. A pudding-and-coffee walk through the West Village suddenly sounds like a perfectly reasonable Saturday afternoon.
Then there is Levain Bakery, where the season is getting the giant-cookie treatment. Alongside its seasonal lineup, Levain is offering a Pumpkin Spiced Cake, bringing warm spices into the bakery’s rotation. The menu also includes treats like a Fall Spiced Chocolate Chunk Cookie and apple cider, which means you could theoretically create an entire afternoon out of one bakery stop. The dream, obviously, is to grab something pumpkin, add a cookie for good measure, and then wander around the city pretending you are the main character in a Nancy Meyers movie.
For something a little more downtown and a little more iconic, head to Dominique Ansel Bakery in SoHo for October’s Pumpkin Cronut®. The famous pastry is filled with creamy pumpkin ganache and dulce de leche ganache. The Cronut® changes flavor every month, so there is something especially exciting about knowing that this particular combination has a tiny window of existence. It is the kind of dessert that makes a Saturday morning pastry run feel like an actual event — preferably followed by wandering around SoHo with no particular destination and accidentally walking into a store you absolutely did not need to visit.
For the froyo girlies, Birdie’s in the West Village deserves a spot on the itinerary. The shop has made frozen yogurt feel decidedly cool again, pairing its froyo with an entire candy selection and toppings that include Biscoff crunch, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, cookie dough, brownies and chocolate chips. While Birdie’s current NYC menu does not list a dedicated pumpkin froyo flavor, the combination of tart froyo with cinnamon-y toppings and Biscoff is basically begging to become your own unofficial seasonal creation. It is less “pumpkin spice everything” and more “cute West Village girl gets froyo after shopping,” which might actually be even more appealing.
And then there is Ample Hills, where pumpkin gets the full ice-cream treatment. Its seasonal Falling for Pumpkin flavor combines pumpkin ice cream made with pumpkin puree and warm spices with brown sugar, house-made cinnamon-sugar cone crunchies and marshmallow swirls. Basically, it tastes like someone took every cozy dessert craving and put it into a scoop. With Ample Hills locations in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side, it is an easy excuse to make ice cream part of a neighborhood walk, even when the weather starts getting a little crisp.
Maybe that is what makes this time of year so fun in New York. It is not really about pumpkin. It is about having another excuse to make an ordinary day feel a little more special. It is the Friend you have been meaning to see, the Saturday morning walk that somehow turns into a three-hour adventure, or ordering the seasonal thing simply because you know it will disappear before you have gotten around to trying it twice.
— Your Friend
