Chocolatea Cafe and Tea Bar

     This summer's vacation took us to Baltimore, Maryland with day trips to Washington, DC and Philadelphia. Our significant dining experiences, however, happened mostly in the Baltimore area. We stayed near the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University, and most of our mornings were spent at this cafe frequented and staffed by college students. Few things in life give me a sense of excitement and hope like the aroma of academia.
     The space is small and, as I would've expected, it includes a tiny library nook. Their menu includes an extensive variety of chocolates, teas, and coffees, hot, iced, and frozen. The teas alone take up five pages online! Hubby is picky about his coffee, and since he found a satisfactory cup here, this became our starting point for each day of exploration.

   

     John welcomed the morning with a large and comforting latte. I tried that once, but I also tried their iced latte. Their coffee has body, and the flavor is robust. For breakfast we ordered a plain (sorry, classic) Belgian waffle, and a toasted bagel with smoked salmon, cream cheese, onions and capers. With all my experience with bagels and lox, I never paid attention to the capers. This time, I discovered what a punch of flavor they bring to the party.

   
Even on Father's Day, this was Hubby's retreat of choice. The official celebration would happen at dinner, but I know the hour he spent at Chocolatea reading the Wall Street Journal with his big mug of coffee in hand was the best part of his day.

BB Free ©2016

Bailey's Coffee Bar

It's good to be a Bailey on Florida's Sanibel Island, or at least it was back in 1899 when Frank P. Bailey founded his General Store. Even today, it's the island's favorite place for grocery shopping and morning coffee. We tried it by accident. If you're not familiar, it can look like a neglected strip of stores, except there's constant traffic in and out of the store. I wanted to find a swanky coffee shop, but John convinced me to give their Coffee Bar a try. So glad I listened!
     Turns out Bailey's is more Trader Joe's than country store. The bakery is what inspired me to blog about this deceivingly sleepy place. I got two cookies for breakfast. 'Cookies?' You say. The biggest, moistest, cakiest Black and White cookie I have ever seen, and I've had the best you can find in New York. This one beat them all. My other cookie was a chocolate chunk. Also the size of a saucer, gooey, with chocolate mixed in the dough and so many bubbling boulders of milk chocolate, shards of dark chocolate, and semi-sweet chocolate kisses, you could ask, 'Would you like some cookie with all that chocolate?'
    That's just what we ordered. Every cookie, cake, brownie, muffin, scone, and piece of fudge is made fresh daily, and the selection made me feel greedy and hungry and dangerously close to throwing caution to the wind and binge to the edge of a diabetic coma. Fortunately, my temperate husband was there to keep me away from the overgrown eclairs, the stuffed croissants, the apple crisps that looked like huge gnarled blobs of glazed ecstasy, the lemon bars, the cream horns... I'll stop now.

    The coffee was good too. On my first visit, I was greeted by a poster of a Butterbeer frozen latte inspired by my beloved Harry Potter. No need to look further. It was a big cup of sweet butterscotch fun. On my second visit, I had a moccha latte and I must say, love my Starbucks but didn't miss it at all on this fine spring morning.
     Goes to show you can't judge a coffee shop by it's façade.

BB Free ©2014