PHOTO BY REBECCA RAFFERTY House of Whacks says of its Cracked Cake, Imagine that pudding and cheesecake had a baby. The Cracked Cake looked like an ordinary lemon square covered in powdered sugar, but the chef promised it was more. “Imagine that pudding and cheesecake had a baby,” was how Es Davy described her signature dessert at House of Whacks, a new restaurant in the St. Paul Quarter that specializes in comfort foods both savory and sweet. “That baby ascended to heaven for three days and was touched by God,” Es D, as she prefers to be called, went on. “It came back to Earth to become Cracked Cake, to bless everyone with its presence.”
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It’s been four years since the Brooklyn-based garage rock quartet Hard Nips released its brilliant EP “Bunny.” The wait is over with the June 4 release of its third full-length album, “Master Cat,” via the Rochester indie record label Dadstache Records. With three of the four members having moved to New York from Japan, Hard Nips came together in the late-aughts, and has since refined its sound to include an increasing number of sugary guitar hooks and itchy dance beats. “Master Cat” feels like a timeless confirmation of pop’s all-encompassing power. Hard Nips’s latest release ventures through hooky yet hard-edged power pop that’s infectious and at times frantic think Blondie, Shonen Knife, and the B-52’s, but through a garage pop lens.
Embroiled in scandal, Mayor Lovely Warren faces a tough battle against City Councilmember Malik Evans in the mayoral race. Mayor Lovely Warren stood at the podium outside her office at City Hall facing what would have been a circular firing squad of reporters had she given them a chance to pull the trigger. There were plenty of questions. Her husband, Timothy Granison, had been arraigned on drug and weapons charges earlier in the day. Prosecutors alleged he was a player in a cocaine ring and police claimed to have found drugs on him and an unregistered handgun and a semi-automatic rifle in the Woodman Park house he shares with Warren and their 10-year-old daughter.