So thoroughly do I admire the great Escoffier’s comment on architecture that I hope I might be excused for quoting it twice in a single year: “Architecture,” he avowed, “is the noblest of all the arts and its highest manifestation is the art of the pastry chef.” If proof were needed, two new bakeries, or salons de the, have just opened in Manhattan, and their architecture is as charming as their cream-clogged, high-caloric confections.

Allow me to say – as a heartfelt aside – that, although I have often complained about the absence of good, or even mediocre, bakeries in the city, things are starting to change. The two establishments to be considered, Lady M Cake Boutique and Fluff, are at the forefront of that change. Not only are they very good, but their innovative excellence combines the questing courage of nouvelle cuisine with the pluralistic aesthetics of postmodern art.

Beyond that, they could not be more different in the philosophy of their baking or the look of their boutiquish shops. Lady M is all refinement. Among its offerings are a famous crepe cake whose 20 exquisitely thin layers, interlaid with cream, form a white-on-white pattern that recalls the finest abstractions of Agnes Martin. (Other delectations are green-tea eclairs and a Montblanc whose commingling of cream and chestnut puree surpasses Angelina’s on the Rue de Rivoli, often considered the best in the world.)

The insistent whiteness, the opulent minimalism, the luxurious severity of the decor, designed by Sam Trimble, may be taken as an architectonic projection of the signature crepe cake. The white walls, white chairs, and long, white counter of Lady M are visible through the clear floor-to-ceiling glass facade that separates the shop from the street and imbues the whole experience of the place with an air of hieratic pristineness, a sense of sweetness and light.

The only qualification to this minimalism is the almost operatic fanciness of the chandeliers. These are so obviously incongruous that a potent visual poetry emerges from what happens between them and the rest of the decor.

Mr. Trimble, who has worked with Peter Marino and then with the Rockwell Group, has created several other sites in the city. Among these are the charmingly inventive wine shop, Best Cellars, on Lexington and 87th, and Patisserie Payard, at Lexington and 73rd. Let it be said of the latter that its decor, unlike that of Lady M, far surpasses the excellence of its cakes.

Opposing this purity is the calculated entropy of Fluff. It invokes debased colors like pink and gray, exposed concrete floors and exterior walls, and thousands of strips of felt and stained plywood on the interior walls. In this way, Fluff strives to create a visual equivalent for the noise and tumult of the club scene, all in a vocabulary suggesting 1960s Motel Mod.

In a statement on their Web site, the young architects of Lewis/Tsurumaki/Lewis declare that “This design/build project explores a new architectural surface made from an excessive repetition and assembly of common, banal and cheap materials.” Thanks to the militant strips along the walls, some three miles end to end, Fluff has all the insistent motion of a starburst at that first, suspended nanosecond of creation. Its relentless interior comes after the viewer, engulfs him, and moves on.

Fluff’s cakes, believe it or not, are of a piece with its decor. Its signature creations are reconceived Twinkies and snowballs (chocolate and cream inside, pink, rubbery coconut frosting outside), which have been analyzed and reconstituted with only the finest gourmet ingredients. In addition to these are tall, pink layer cakes, pink cupcakes, and other things using an abundance of pink food coloring.

The case could certainly be made that there is an analogy between these over determined Twinkies and the use of popular culture in the art of the East Village Scene (as totemized in the new exhibition at the New Museum). You find here the same self-consciousness, the same exacting calibration, very different from the unreflecting spontaneity that created the first Twinkies and the first graffiti murals generations before.

At the same time, though, both the Twinkies and the art at the New Museum show a profound love of fun, a need to resuscitate older pleasures. These are not at all elevated, but rather transformed by the more complicated manner in which, as adults, we re-experience the satisfactions of our childhoods.

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Speaking of childhood pleasures, I went the other day, and for the first time since my nonage, to FAO Schwarz on Fifth avenue and 59th Street. How much bigger it is now than it was in my day, and how much smaller it seems!

Back then, it presided over the first few floors of the Squibb Building next door. Since 1986, it has occupied half of the footprint of Edward Durrell Stone’s General Motors Building and recently reopened to a new design by the Rockwell Group. The soaring, cavernous expanse loses in mystery what it may have gained in a kind of cool grandeur. And while there is nothing wrong with the design, it is not a stunning success, either.

Among the new features in the three-level store are floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto Fifth Avenue, a classic ice-cream parlor in the middle of the first floor, and an urban treehouse. Its best feature, however, is an LED grid that covers the entire ceiling, from Fifth to Madison, with 20,000 light bulbs that can be programmed to assume different colors and patterns.

Ultimately, what enchants children is not what enchants adults. And it may be that the younger set, avid of the newest gizmo or the oldest Steiff teddy bear, will view matters differently from me. But I found in this new installation nothing of the enchantment I remember from my own raids upon that vanished FAO Schwarz of 40 birthdays past.