Los 10 Pan Dulces Más Ricos / Top Ten Pan Dulces Buenos Aires

We made another Pan Dulce list again! This time Carolina Aguirre of Planeta Joy gave us some Top Ten List love and La Nación also published the article.

This is not the first time we have shown up on a Top 10 list.

Just last night I stayed up 'till 5am working at the Dot Shopping mall.

We were there actually supervising more than anything else.

We hired a window dresser to help out our new shop at the Dot Shopping mall. It came out fantastic! It was like opening a new store only one month into having a new store already.

I so wanted to take pictures, but the shopping mall turns the lights off and the pictures would not come out nice at all.

This would be my round about way of saying that you could also get our frequently Top Ten mentioned Pan Dulce there as well.

Now, I just need to take a nap.

2007 - Bacanal Top 8 Pan Dulces
2009 - Oh La Lá Top 5 Pan Dulces
2009 - Joy Top 10 Pan Dulces


********************

Este año volvimos a las listas de los mejores Pan Dulces! Este año fue de la mano de Carolina Aguirre de la revista Joy. Nos incluyó entre los 10 mejores pan dulces!

Esto no fue la primera vez que nos han incluido en este tipo de listas.

Justo anoche estuvimos trabajando sobre nuestro nuevo local en el Dot hasta las 5 horas de la mañana. El local quedó muy lindo y no lo pude creer, pero fue como recibir un local nuevo, solamente un mes después de haber abierto un local nuevo.

Me hubiera gustado tomar fotos, pero el shopping apaga la mayoría de las luces y las fotos no salían bien con tan poca luz.

Básicamente estoy tratando de avivarlos de que los pan dulces también se pueden conseguir en el Dot.

Ahora necesito dormir un poco.

Muchas gracias Carolina!  Thank you Carolina!

Pan Dulce on My Mind

This is the time of the year that I am busiest, stressed out, and would have been pulling my hair out by now, but that was last year´s trick.

Patricia Gilmore is this year´s Pan Dulce Angel. She, and 18 volunteers, went around the city and gave any homeless person they could find an edible hug (a.k.a. Pan Dulce). I donated some pan dulces to her idea and you could read more about that by clicking here. She promises to organize this thing better next year. She could possibly have a database that would be valuable to the city... just thinking out loud.

This year we participated with Girl´s Night Out and we raffled off 5 Pan Dulces de Tus Sueños. There were also many other things raffled off and it turned out to be a very fun night. The weather was very nice, drinking champagne, surrounded by women. Too bad I forgot the camera at home.

Yo Que Voz, also participated and they have a promotion going on with our cookies as well.

Oh, La La (the picture above was taken from the magazine) just placed us among the top 5 pan dulces this year. You won´t find it in the link I provided though; it´s only in their printed magazine.

So far, we are on track to selling almost three times as many Pan Dulces this year as we did last year, and that is a great way to wrap up this holiday season.

Bacanal Loves Pan Dulce (Panettone)

This is the end of the Panettone (Pan Dulce) season for us. When we started Sugar & Spice, the idea was to bring to the market what was missing. We did not want to make alfajores for example because you can get one in every corner. We made one exception and that was Pan Dulce (Panettone).

Most Panettone in Argentina is made with candied fruit and I just do not like it. I know it´s a matter of taste--to each his own. However, there were so few options for those of us who only liked the more noble inclusions like hazelnuts, almonds, cashews, and walnuts laced with orange peel and raisins soaked in cognac. Now it looks like there is some competition in the market place.

Bacanal went through the trouble of selecting their top 8 "most delicious and original" offerings and Sugar & Spice was among those chosen. We are rubbing elbows with the likes of Jean Paul Bondoux (Alvear Palace Hotel), Plaza Mayor, Beatriz Chomnalez (Ceasar Park Hotel), Las Violetas, etc.

If you click on the picture below you will be taken to the scanned images of the full article in this month´s Bacanal.

The Bake Shop Ghost and other books

**originally this post came out on the 19th of June, 2007. I have added to it.**



I seem to get a lot of hits on my posts regarding children so I thought I would add another entry for those people looking up things kid related. I can´t come up with a list of great children´s books because that list would be so long. I wanted to maybe limit it to the most recent additions to the library that I think are outstanding. This one I picked up on our last trip to Chicago and I liked it so much that I decided to review it in Amazon. If you click on the picture you will be taken to that site. If you would like to see all of my reviews in Amazon you can click -here-.

I have very few reviews but at least they are very helpful if you go by the votes I have received.

Some other books that I think are great follow:


"I´m a Manatee" It comes with a CD of the song. It's very catchy, clever and sprinkled with sophisticated vocabulary. Adults will need to translate some of these verses. For example, "immune from human folly and inanity".

We loved this one so much we bought another John Lithgow book called Mahalia Mouse Goes to College. This one also comes with a CD featuring the author reading the story as part of his commencement speech to the Harvard's class of 2005. Just like the other story, this one is also full of sophisticated vocabulary. In this one Mahalia goes out looking for food and scurries into a college student´s backpack sniffing out some cheese when all of a sudden the zipper closes. She comes out later in the middle of a class and is entranced by the professor´s words warning his students that this is a very advanced class. She stays on to study and eventually graduates and is finally reunited with her family at graduation day.

We are having so much fun with these books that we are going to try more John Lithgow books and CD´s. He even has a website that I think is pretty cool.

My 5 Year Old's Favorite Restaurant Short List - Albamonte (1 of 5 )

Normally you don´t let a 5 year old make too many decisions for the home. You really can't rely on them to decide what car to buy, what TV to buy, or what airline to use for your vacation trip. However, one day I asked her to name her 5 favorite Buenos Aires restaurants and her list was quite impressive.

I decide to share some of them with you. They are in no particular order because when you ask a 5 year old to rate them, the rating changes by the minute. However, if I put them all in one post it would make for a very long post. I will make this a current, up to the visit series taking pictures of the dishes as we go visit the restaurants. This past weekend it was Albamonte´s turn at bat.

Albamonte

Av. Corrientes 6735

Chacarita

4553-2400

4554-4486

You wont find too many foreigners here. The wine list is very short, they have cheesy plastic plants for decoration and it looks a bit old. However, it is a local classic and the food is great so who cares about the other stuff.



We start out with pizza as an appetizer. As you can see from the picture, this is thin styled pizza. The girls then have their plain pasta, dressed with a little olive oil that they bring to the table and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. How on earth can a 5 year old discern between having pasta at this place versus any other? Well she does. Believe it or not you can mess up pasta. If she doesn't like the combination of olive oil, grated cheese and pasta then the restaurant will not get into her short list.



We then have one of my favorite dishes in all of Argentina Pollo a la Gasparini. This is a braised chicken with white wine, garlic and rosemary. Throw in some hand cut french fries and you have heaven on a plate. I love soaking the fries in the white wine mixture on the bottom of the pan. This one takes a while to make so we always call it in before we get there.



I am so picky about dessert that I often don´t order any. My daughters love chocolate ice cream and I do admit that it is hard to find bad ice cream here so once in a while I will have it as well, otherwise it´s a cortadito and the check.

There is usually a long line of people waiting for a table. We always get there at 8pm sharp and avoid the waiting. If you go any other time you can't say I did not warn you.

By the way, I found a recipe on Epicurious for this dish, you just need to replace rosemary for the thyme. In case you can't make it down here you can try making it at home.