I Love The Bakery

Do we have access to wheat in America?
When I was a kid there were a plethora of Italian bakeries. The neighborhoods have changed,
but the bakeries didn't seem to follow their clientele. Are all the baked goods in conglomerates
now? Is everyone gluten free?
We still get paczkis before lent; but there aren't a lot of polish bakeries around Detroit any
longer. I am thankful there are enough Catholics around for us to get them from our bakery,
and some who have moved away still come back for them on Fat Tuesday. Even better, the
non-Catholics in this neighborhood have picked up the paczki habit.
Bakery, it would seem to me, should be a wonderful small business.
Cher and Nicholas Cage made bakery seem the most wonderful thing in the world a human
could encounter... in the movie, Moonstruck.
So many times I go into a bakery to find a few pastries and some continental type sandwiches.
Ok....
What happened to the real bear claw, with candied and dried fruits imbedded with walnut
pieces in the tender yeast raised dough, and with crushed walnut and pecan sprinkled generously
in the moderate white icing on top?
Knudsen's Danish Bakery in northwest Detroit is still pretty close to a real bread and buns and
donuts bakery. It has much of the fare it always had before the chief long-time baker got sick
and went on hiatus.
Early every morning at 6am, people line up for glazed donuts- light, fluffy, right out of the oven.
There used to be sugar donuts too. They were wonderful. But now, though I truly miss the old
sugars, a bread donut sprinkled with cinnamon sugar has appeared. We get jelly donuts, glazed
twists, lunch sticks. By noon, we get the leftovers from the morning, and by closing time at
6pm we know most all the donuts are gone.
Breads are baked there. Rolls, cookies, cheesecake pieces abound.
Sheetcakes are everywhere; and on Thursdays you can reserve an orange icing or Italian creme
cake. We try not to order the Italian creme because the cream cheese frosting is so expertly
made, so light, so fluffy, adorning such a heavy cream cheese cake, that our arteries sometimes
harden when we unearth the confection from its crisp white box to lift it, then lower it lovingly
to our beautiful heirloom cake plate.
I know. I sound like the beer-o describing a drink of mug beer in the documentary.
I can't help it. I love bakeries ... even though they barely exist anymore.