By Norah Lubeck and Saul Janiak Stein
As summer shifts to fall, and the weather changes right along with it, one of the greatest things to enjoy is baked goods. Behind maybe only coffee, the most popular treats during autumn are warm, sweet, and hopefully spiced.
Going out into local bakeries opens your eyes to the fact that being a fall dessert doesn’t mean it has to be pumpkin spice. On the contrary, many flavors that people associate with “pumpkin spice” have nothing to do with pumpkin at all. They are simply the flavors that accompany a good pumpkin pie. Those same flavors accompany apple, ginger, pecan, and coffee desserts just the same.
The combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves makes its appearance in plenty of other desserts, and just as well delivers that comfortable sensation many people look for in pumpkin spice.
Local Durham bakeries captured that perfectly, as customers started to pour in to escape the frigid air.
Sometimes, it is actually pumpkin that people want, and so pumpkin they get. Guglhupf bakery in Durham features a pumpkin ginger mousse, which, while not warm, quenches that pumpkin spice craving. Made up of soft and sweet pumpkin mousse, sitting on a bed of pumpkin cake. To add both texture and a slight kick to cut through the mousse, sit a crystallized ginger.
Altogether, the dish doesn’t differ much in texture or flavor, but does both quite well.
Guglhupf is a bakery, restaurant, bar, and cafe. And with a hot coffee that most people are looking for in the fall, they make dry baked goods by the dozen to accompany their cappuccinos. Another item on the Guglhupf menu is the ginger cranberry scone. Dipping more into the festive holiday flavors, the scone has crystallized ginger and dried cranberries inside it.
If you had gone earlier in the day, the scone would’ve been warm and soft, great for breakfast or tea in the afternoon.
Loaf is another bakery in Downtown Durham that often makes its appearance at the local farmers’ market.
Loaf makes a lot of bread and cookies for the community. Besides their daily pastries, they make a lot of packaged goods for sale. One item we tried was their pecan chocolate chip cookies. These were decadent, thin cookies, certainly cooked with a lot of butter to give them the crispy texture.
They also featured a ginger molasses cookie. While often overpowering, molasses is another flavor reminiscent of fall. The ginger, along with it cut through the deep sweet flavour.
Besides the cookies, two of the sweets that they had made that morning included an apple cream puff and a small shortbread. With a strong cinnamon flavor, they came through with that fall theme.
One other newer spot in Durham that was spotlighted was Sweets by Shayda. They are a bakery that specialize in macaroons and have a huge variety of flavors to choose from. Outside of standard desserts, macaroons are a fancier way to create fun flavor profiles and build on classic ones. The fall flavor that stood out the most was their coffee flavor. A key theme in winter months is a warm coffee, and they capture the rich coffee taste in the crunchy outside and cream filling.
It’s almost certainly getting colder, becoming darker earlier, and leaves are falling from trees. But all that means is it’s the perfect time to sit down in a cafe and enjoy a sweet treat. Guglhupf, Sweets by Shayda, and Loaf are three great places to go to.
