Pastries from multiple cuisines
By James Card
Carmen Pewtress has opened European Delights, a bakery that offers pastries from a wide variety of cuisines.
“I have everything from everywhere. I have Greek. I have Turkish. I have Romanian. I have Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, French,” she said.
There is baklava and krantz cake and rum salami. The menu ranges across cultures.
“Rum salami. It’s not salami, it’s a desert. Way back in communist times when we didn’t have any electricity or gas, we had had to come up with ideas to make something.
Now it’s a hit. They revived it. It’s like a log and you slice it. It’s like a cake,” she said.
Pewtress also makes ishlers, a small cookie that was popular in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a favorite of Emperor Franz Joseph I.
“That’s an almost 200-year old recipe. It was lost. It’s a very old recipe. Somebody in Transylvania found the recipe and revived it again. It’s a very plain cookie. Not a lot of sugar but it’s made of 90% walnuts,” said Pewtress.
For Lent, she will make paczkis for special orders but she said she doesn’t have the manpower to produce the large amount of pastries to fulfill the demand during that small window of time. She also takes special orders for birthdays and other events. During the week she bakes for Java Jive, a newly opened coffee shop near Stange’s of Waupaca.
The owner of the nearby 81 Market is a big fan of her coffee cream-stuffed croissant. “She said that’s all I need to sell. I don’t need anything else,” said Pewtress. “She’s obsessed with those.”
As of now she does not have drinks. Pewtress plans to obtain a liquor license and will sell European liquors and Romanian wines by the bottle and the entryway area will be a small gift shop with Romanian souvenirs and crafts.
Pewtress is planning on hosting a small farmer’s market and is looking for vendors.
“I want to do events with the neighbors in the summer. I want to turn this area into a promenade. This area has so much potential,” she said.
The bakery will be open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and from 9 a.m. to noon Sundays. She plans to offer a limited menu featuring some daily specials.
“I’m doing five things Thursday; five things Friday and Saturday go big with all my stuff. I can do a bread day and breakfast pastries for example,” she said.
She has a Facebook page but while she was selling her pastries at the Farmer’s Market it became overwhelming to keep up with so she let it go idle.
Once more settled, she will post images of her fresh-baked creations on Facebook and Instagram.
European Delights is located at N2740 County Trunk QQ in King.