Delightful Pastries + Café Brings Chicagoans Authentic Paczki On Fat Tuesday

Lake Michigan is to Chicago as Paczki Day is to Delightful Pastries + Café, synonymous. Highly coveted in the Chicagoland market, acquiring a Paczki from Delightful Pastries + Café on Paczki Day is comparable to scoring Blackhawks tickets. And this victory is a sweet one. Paczki are fried yeast donuts with assorted fillings and they historically symbolize the start of Lent. This year Paczki Day is on Tuesday, February 17 and owner Dobra Bielinski and her team are already gearing up to crank out over 50,000 paczki using a recipe that has been in the family for over five generations.

It's nearly impossible to resist the aroma when walking past Delightful Pastries + Café onFat Tuesday. While customers can snag day-of paczki, they are strongly encouraged to pre-order the deep-fried donuts. Delightful Pastries + Café's recipe dates back many generations and Dobra and her team are constantly developing innovative new flavors to keep their customers on their toes each year. Favorites include Passion Fruit Jelly, Jamison Whiskey Chocolate and Fresh Strawberries with Whipped Cream. The flavor explosion doesn't end there with this year's new flavor being a take on the American classic, PB & J.

There is a lot of behind the scenes coordination that goes into making Paczki Day such a success at Delightful Pastries + Cafe. Customers can rest assured that Delightful Pastries + Cafe makes its super-secret paczki dough with local Wisconsin butter and they are fried invegetable oil instead of lard. Bielinski always reminds customers, "People really eat jelly-filled donuts for the filling, not the donut itself...with a paczek, what happens is that people eat it for the dough and not the filling. Traditionally, there is less filling and more dough. Once the treat cools off, when you bite into it, it springs back and doesn't collapse like a pancake." And if it's an authentic paczek you're searching for, look no further than Delightful Pastries + Café.