Happy Birthday, Emma!

The Korean bakery chain Emma has a branch inside the complex where I work, Mido Sangga. This branch is celebrating its 27th birthday today; as a gift to customers, the bakery is giving away free boxes of cookies to anyone who purchases bakery items worth W10,000 or more.

I generally like Emma. It's one of the few bakeries I know that can do French baguettes correctly. Emma recently rolled out (ha! a car/bread pun!) an olive ciabatta that, while too soft and undercooked on the outside, has a perfect ciabatta consistency on the inside. I want to use that bread to make a variant of the muffuletta, an Italian deli-meat sandwich normally made with a muffuletta loaf.

Emma has some hits, like the baguette and the ciabatta, but it also has some misses, like its cakes and macaroons. As with the cakes at other Korean bakeries, Emma's cakes tend to lack everything that makes a cake delicious: eggs, sugar, and butter. But Emma's macaroons are especially frightening; it's almost as if the bakers had deliberately set out to make them from a mixture of cardboard and that paste that elementary-school kids like to eat. I bought exactly one macaroon from Emma. Never again.

All in all, though, Emma makes good products. I duck down there more frequently than I should to buy sandwiches, apple turnovers, cookies, tofu chips (addictive), and baguettes. The ladies who staff the place are very friendly, including one who, at first, I had mistakenly thought of as an arrogant cow... until we actually started talking to each other. (I do feel bad about my initial misapprehension, but she really did seem to be giving off a cold, nasty vibe the first time I saw her haughty, high-cheekboned face. Just goes to show that first impressions can often be misleading. Turns out she's the nicest bakery lady in the world.)

I wish Emma a Happy 27th. Here's to 27 more years of good, fresh bread!