I have often confessed to having a true loathing of baking. Sure, I had a dessert company for over five years in the Boston area that made its name selling chocolate mousse brownies and oatmeal raisin cookies to Legal Seafood and DeLucca’s, but that was purely business. Baking was lucrative in a city that could barely fit in an oven let alone a mixer, so baking and bringing it into gourmet stores worked. But I hate to measure, I hate the preciseness of it all, and I certainly was not born with the gift to frost a cake like Martha Stewart.

On a delicious side note: We dined at the Beach Bistro at the Concession the other night, and leave it to Sean Murphy to hit it out of the park again. The room is incredibly spacious, and the culinary membership makes the old University Club seem like a hot dog stand (well, with a good view).

 A culinary membership to the Beach Bistro at the Concession--what a deal.

Listen up, all you event people and wedding planners: This IS the place, and the best gift of all is a culinary membership to a dream dining club that includes piano playing and long yellow roses, a deep rich wood bar and the “original band” of culinary players from the Beach Bistro. What to get the hard-to-gift foodie in your life? A foodie membership, of course!