Ayun Halliday (No Touch Monkey!, Jobhopper) is taking the Internets by force this month--not just with her food blog but also getting the word about her new book, Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste (Seal Press, $14.95). She is longtime contributor to BUST magazine with the Mother Superior columns and is the writer, editor, publisher and sole employee of the East Village Inky, a zine that would come across as retro (a zine!) if you could get past how awesome it is. She's stopped by some great places only nine days into the tour (including Beatrice, where she talks about memoirs and her pet peeves about them and Cupcakes Take The Cake, where she talks about cupcakes). She answered some questions about new foods and New York and was kind enough to not make fun if I mentioned I ate an entire recipe's worth of page 121's Post Coital Pancakes totally alone (I remember, once upon a time, having what should have preceeded these pancakes but I never remembered pancakes being so good).

In your book, you have a hilarious cake recipe that riffs on the
triffle and makes fun of it along the way. Did you go crazy and take
that not-at-all stuffy attitude to other cakes? The one at your
wedding to Greg [Kotis, Tony-winning co-author of Urinetown and the union of that no less than the New York Times profiled, then revisited 11 years later]? Or your children's birthdays?

The shitty kitty confection? A friend of mine just ran up to me in the playground to say she was going to make it - I'm particularly gratified because she was part of the pit crew that took care of our old devil, Jambo (RIP) when we would go on
vacation.

Inky's second birthday cake was particularly memorable. Due to a heat wave it never set up. (And let's not even talk about the temperature in my 340 square foot apartment when that fucker was in the oven!) There were all these little kids running through the sprinklers of an East Village playground, waving fistfuls of cake that looked like... wait,are you seeing a scatalogical theme to my baking? I am.

Milo insists on "pink mustard" for his cakes. It's boiled icing dyed an anemic, washed out red. We're usually at Greg's childhood home for Milo's birthday so it's just family, maybe one or two adult guests. Last year, we ate the cake off the tail gate of our rented car at the Wellfleet Drive-In. And, of course, being us, we didn't time it very well, so we're like, "Oh, god, light the candles or we're going to miss all this Harry Potter exposition!"

One of my favorite moments was how you discovered how you, as a child, loved spanokpita. Since writing the book has Inky opened up to any new foods? What do her eyes light up over?

Say what? Inky wrote the book? Ohhhhhh...I see what you mean. You know, I'm really racking my brains because I've heard from a few readers who feel bad for the little tyke - saddled not only with a picky appetite, but also a mother who publicly describes her irritation with it! Let's see, the book went to bed in January and it's now June. Well, peaches are back in season, anyway. She's very enthusiastic about peaches. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago she inexplicably started hating on the cantaloupe. One step forward, one step back.

She does seem to enjoy feeding the Tamagotchi I bought her today. That makes her eyes light up. As do the watermelon gumballs at the Laundromat. She loves those things so much, she angles to get them by offering to treat Milo, too, using her own money. How can I say no to that? I've never tasted one, but I suspect from the effort they expend cracking through the candy coating, that those gumballs date back to Bush's first term, if not the Clinton administration.



Photo by Veronica Davidov

You and I met, for a quick second, at the Mermaid Parade last year (I was
shaking and shimmying as ornate cardboard castles sunk around me and my friends as mermaid from Vienna when you were with a party full of baby mermaids), what would make a perfect culinary
day at Coney Island?



Oh HELL yeah! I'd start off with some fish and chips from Nathan's. The first time I ordered it, it sounded so counter-intuitive, but man, the
grease, the salt... that shit were good! (Mermaids talk like sailors, did you know?) I guess I'd probably have to have some cotton candy. No ice cream. I swore off it after some boardwalk soft serve that came out all granulated and gummy. Instead, perhaps a large mason jar of margaritas brought from home. (The refreshment of choice for the adult contingent of India's 8th Birthday Mermaid Brigade, two-time third-place medalists in last year's Parade!) I might could go with an ear of hot, buttered corn, depending on how the kernels look - I was raised in Indiana, you know, and can't abide the shriveled or the elderly, corn-wise. Leaving the boardwalk, I'd hook over to Totonno's. I think it's true that they do have the best pizza in New York, better even than Grimaldi's, and I love those pale green wooden booths, whose bench seats are like half an ass shy of comfortable.

Dirty Sugar Cookies is available now, at bookstores or on Amazon.