Greenpoint is a v. trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn.
It's also home to a giant homemade funfetti cake with giant homemade sprinkles.
Like, GIANT sprinkles.
The cake is made by the chefs at Hail Mary, a restaurant that also serves things like fried chicken, deep-fried burrata, and a grilled cheese FILLED WITH HOUSE-MADE CHEESE.
To make the sprinkles, they start by mixing royal icing with six different kinds of food coloring.
Then, they pipe the sprinkles onto parchment-lined baking sheets BY HAND.
And OMG it takes forever. But it's so, so worth it.
The sprinkles need to sit out at room temperature for a day to dry, and then they're ready to go.
The cake is made from scratch, but the chefs use a special "birthday cake extract" to make it taste like the boxed mix we all know and love.
And ugh, no, you can't buy the birthday cake extract to use at home (for cakes and cookies and oatmeal and smoothies and also probably just to drink straight-up). Hail Mary buys it from a purveyor that only sells to restaurants :(
(Because cake from scratch is amazing, but cake from a box is amazing too.)
Actual art that hangs in the dining room.
There are also store-bought sprinkles baked into the cake, because when they tried to bake the homemade sprinkles, they just dissolved. And the frosting?
SALTED CARAMEL BUTTERCREAM.
Once the cake is frosted, it gets covered with sprinkles. Which also takes forever.
But, again, so awesome and worth it.
The cake is so big that each one gets cut into 12 (HUUUUGE) slices.
And you guys, it is good. The cake is sweet and the frosting is salty and THE SPRINKLES will make you want to bounce around in your seat like a little kid on a sugar high.
Because you will be ~excited~ but also maybe on a little bit of a sugar high.
The cake is available every day, for $11 a slice.
Hail Mary is also doing cool stuff with savory food. Like deep-frying very fancy cheese in not-so-fancy breadcrumbs.
Ham and Sohla El-Waylly, the chefs and owners of Hail Mary, initially set out to open a fancier restaurant. Ultimately they settled on the kitschy, high-low concept because it was cheaper to open and better suited to the neighborhood. As part of this high-low approach, their take on a mozzarella stick is, according to Sohla El-Waylly, "the fanciest burrata you can buy, flown in from Italy, breaded in Progresso bread crumbs and deep-fried."
And making fried chicken out of birds so fresh that they have to hang them in the kitchen for a couple of days before they fry them.
But what do people think about being served a chicken with the feet still on it? "It's polarizing," El-Waylly says. "Some people walk out when they see it; some people send it back before they try it."
But no matter what you eat for dinner, it's all about that cake.
