It’s a common fantasy: Accidentally locked in a bakery, forgotten overnight, we quickly eat everything in sight and fall into a sugary, carb-filled dream of sweet-spun bliss. Sequestered away where nobody will find us until morning, we wake from time to time and continue to eat cakes until we sleep again. Short of that happening in this lifetime, we frequently daydream of walking the aisles of bakeries, latte in hand as we pull pain au chocolat and sticky buns from racks, consuming everything in a hurried rush before we’re asked to leave.

Coca is a word used in Catalonia and neighboring regions for many kinds of baked doughs and pastries, both sweet and savory. The Catalan and Occitan word has the same root as “cake” and comes from the Dutch word kok, which entered the local lexicon during the reign of the Carolingians in Catalonia (759-809)

Editor’s note: To cap off our annual review of the year’s best eating experiences, we’ve unleashed our imaginations to create the Turkish food court of our dreams. After a period of protest, we finally broke down and visited the Zorlu Center, a new, high-profile shopping mall in Istanbul and a showcase of international brand names, from Fendi to Jamie Oliver. Our initial attraction was the promise of a particularly well-kept playground, but while we were there, we visited Eataly, the all-Italian culinary emporium.

Editor’s note: The year is coming to an end, which means it’s time for us to look back on all the great eating experiences we had in 2014 and name our favorites among them. Can Pineda At this tiny, century-old restaurant in the neighborhood of El Clot, we ate a simple dish of guisantes lágrima (“tear-shaped peas”) with little bits of jamón ibérico, one of the most delicious culinary treasures we have had all year – and one we will remember for a long time to come.

Horn of plenty, yellow foot, ox tongue, gray knight: the bewitching names are like something out of a fairy tale. But at Casa Lucio, in Sant Antoni, these are all mushrooms you might find on your plate, especially in autumn.

Spata (pop. 10,000) lies just 20 km east of Athens and is probably best known as the location of Athens International Airport. But the town is more than just a gateway into and out of the region – especially at the end of June. That’s when Spata hosts a festival to honor St. Peter and St. Paul, the official protectors of the city. The highlight of the festival comes at the end of the last day, June 30, with a glorious communal meal: Enormous quantities of braised beef that have been cooked for 12 hours over a wood fire are served to all the citizens of Spata and visitors to the town.

Perhaps coffee is underappreciated in Rio because it’s so plentiful. Brazil is the world’s largest producer of coffee, but both the selection and the presentation of the stuff you’ll find in Rio is hardly what a gringo dreams of in the capital country of café. Coffees here are cafezinhos, small, potent, highly sugary and with no milk. A cafezinho is taken standing up at a lanchonete (snack bar) or on a work break in the office in tiny medicine cups filled from an unseemly plastic cylinder. When Brazilians have seen the size of our morning coffee, many have expressed a concern that we could hurt ourselves with such a large quantity. (It’s just a coffee cup.)

China is increasingly becoming a nation of coffee drinkers, a trend that is quietly percolating out beyond the confines of cosmopolitan Shanghai and Beijing. As more and more tea terraces are converted to profitable coffee plantations in the country’s mountainous southwest regions, and with the number of Costa Coffee and Starbucks locations still on the upswing, it’s never been easier to find a decent cup of joe.

Editor's note: For our last stop on CB's Global Bar Crawl this week, we're pulling up a stool at our favorite mezcal bars in Mexico City, kicking back and savoring every last drop. Para todo mal, mezcal. Para todo bien, también. Y si no tiene remedio, tómate litro y medio. For everything bad, mezcal. For everything good, the same. And if that doesn’t help, drink a liter and a half. – Popular saying among mezcal lovers.

Editor's note: Our third installment in the Global Bar Crawl takes us to Barcelona, where gin continues to be the drink of choice among locals. Tomorrow we head to a spot in Istanbul where you can spend an evening visiting a number of bars, all without leaving the building. Spain is a country that loves a long-drink – alcohol in combination with a soft drink, refreshing and open to invention and reinvention. On the heels of creative gastronomy’s efflorescence in recent years, many old drinks, cuisines and forgotten ingredients have returned, revived through new and more sophisticated techniques and interpretations. The gin and tonic, called gintonic here, is one such Spanish obsession, and all that ingenuity and focus have gone into taking this highball to the next level.

Editor’s note: This is the final installment of “Best Bites of 2013,” a roundup of our top culinary experiences over the last year. Be sure to check out the "best bites" in all the other cities CB covers. Breakfast in Erzincan We were strangers in a strange land – eastern Turkey’s Erzincan, to be exact – and Yalçın Kaya welcomed us into his cheese shop with such gracious fervor that it didn’t surprise us to find out that this Anatolian cheesemonger moonlights as an imam.

When we think of white wine in Catalonia, we think of its seemingly endless possibilities. Production of whites here has a 2,000-year-old history. The wide-ranging diversity in the area’s Mediterranean climate and calcareous soils, from the mountains to the sea, and the combination of old grape varieties and newly introduced “foreigners” with traditional and experimental methods of production make for innumerable styles and no taboos. Who knew white was a color with so many variations? The traditional Catalan grape varieties used to make white wine are mainly macabeo, xarel-lo, parellada and garnatxa blanca, but this area of Spain has the largest number of white grapes included in all its protected appellations (D.O.). Where other Spanish D.O.s usually are deeply defined by one or a few varieties, in the Catalunya D.O. there are more than 16 allowed – 35 counting the reds. In fact, this umbrella appellation, which covers wines that do not fall under the 10 subregion designations (Montsant, Penedès, etc.), was created to allow the use of all the grapes of the other Catalan designations in the entire area. It implicitly gives freedom to Catalan winemakers to express more than the old narrower conceptions of terroir and opens the doors to experimentation.

Mushroom hunting has an irresistible, magical pull. Composer John Cage, an avid mushroom collector, found them an integral part of his creative process, once writing: “Much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.” Every fall, thousands of Catalans likewise find themselves under the mushroom’s spell, following the elusive fungus’s silent melody into the woods, a rustic wicker basket in one hand and – more and more these days – a GPS-enabled smartphone in the other.

To call someone a cachaceiro in Brazil is to deal a pretty low Portuguese blow. The word translates roughly to “drunkard” and evokes the image of an unkempt alcoholic clutching a plastic bottle of the powerful local liquor known as cachaça. It’s no coincidence that the name of the drink made with cachaça, the caipirinha, comes from the word caipira, roughly meaning “redneck” or “country.” That the national spirit is invoked in insults is emblematic of the poor image the drink has long had, but which has recently been changing. Like the newly assertive Brazil, the sugarcane-based alcohol is finding its way into chic circles where it was once seen as a bit cheap and rustic. In the past, a posh dinner host in Brazil would offer her guests a uisque (whiskey) or imported wine. But these days, it seems cariocas are finally embracing the truth: the caipirinha is a profoundly refreshing godsend on a steamy Rio summer night. A thriving cachaceiro scene is now budding both in Brazil and among a growing fan base abroad.

Editor’s note: This post wraps up our special series this week featuring our top street food picks in all of the Culinary Backstreets cities. As rapidly as Istanbul marches toward its modern destiny, street food in this city is still served the old-fashioned way, by boisterous ustas with a good pitch and, sometimes, a really good product.