20 East End Avenue

East End Sweets

It's easy—perhaps too easy—to satisfy a serious dessert craving when you live on the Upper East Side. Your condo on East End Avenue is steps from some of the city’s best bakeries and sweets shops. With so many options, it’s helpful to have guidance so you can discern the true crème de la crème.

Two Little Red Hens | 1652 2nd Avenue
This cozy and popular bakery has cultivated an impressive reputation in Manhattan for good reason. Their chocolate cake is wonderfully rich and comes in six different varieties, their tarts are extraordinarily flavorful, and their cupcakes...oh, their cupcakes. Try their Banana PB Fudge Swirl, the Key Lime, or their ridiculous Brooklyn Blackout, a chocolate cupcake filled with chocolate pudding and topped with fudge frosting.

Lady M Cake Boutique | 41 E 78th Street
If you’ve never had a slice of a signature Mille Crêpes cake at Lady M, you should stop what you’re doing and go get one right now. This cake is unlike anything around—it’s made of at least 20 crêpes layered with an airy cream filling and finished with a subtly caramelized topping. The result is a light but impossibly flavorful dessert that’s refreshingly unique and wildly innovative. Lady M offers a large array of other cakes, all of which are prepared with a refined technique that has helped make the bakery one of the best in the city. The runaway success of Lady M has also led to additional locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Singapore.

Serendipity 3 | 226 East 60th Street
Is it crowded and at times a bit touristy? Yes. Is the wait typically an hour at the very least? Uh-huh. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Famed Upper East Side institution Serendipity 3, a primary location in an array of feature films, has become a very popular attraction of the neighborhood. Their famous Frozen Hot Chocolate may not seem to make much sense—how is something simultaneously hot and frozen?—but it is insanely delicious. Having one is a unique experience that every sweets enthusiast must indulge in at least once. Try their classic Frozen Hot Chocolate or their Frozen Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate. You won’t regret it.

Ladurée | 864 Madison Avenue
Ladurée is quite possibly home to the best French macarons in the city. Each small, light-as-air macaron produced here displays through its texture, weightlessness, and saturated color that it is the work of a master craftsman. Ladurée macarons are crisped but soft and creamy on the inside. It’s tough to describe exactly what makes them so great, as one really has to taste for oneself. Try their famous Purple Caramel or Pistachio flavors.

Dylan’s Candy Bar | 315 East 62nd Street and 1011 3rd Avenue
Dylan’s Candy Bar is the closest you’ll get to visiting the dream world of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This colorful and vibrant candy-filled wonderland spans three floors, each of which focuses on something different in the wide world of sweetness. Lollipops, chocolates, rock candy, ice cream, candy-themed drinks, and anything else on the planet related in any way to candy is hidden somewhere within the store. Adults will feel like kids again, and kids will get to act like the proverbial “kids in a candy store.” If not here, where?

Image Courtesy of:©iStock.com/Elenathewise