cracked cookies

Inga Ornelas, Red Bread

You may have met Rose Lawrence already, at her bread stand at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, at her jam-making classes at Jessica Koslow's Sqirl, or at her recent meat-curing class at Surfas. Master food preserver, educator and chef, Rose is co-owner with her husband David of Red Bread -- a lacto-fermented sourdough-infused, social justice-spiced bakery/market/community space that's about to open on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. (The opening date is still TBD.)

If you ask Lawrence how she got the name, Red Bread, she'll tell you. "Red registers like no other color in the mind. Bread has the power to sustain, uplift and nourish. Also, they're my two favorite things."

Says Lawrence, "I went to law school to become a human rights lawyer." But what she found was that combining her love of food and her knowledge of human rights law made a pretty good pairing. "I want to show everyone that good food is simple and accessible. We are activists. We believe in education and good food for the people." Serving nourishing and sustainable food and teaching others to make it with simple and fresh ingredients became her greatest form of social activism.

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Christine Chiao

Banana split cookie at Milk Jar Cookies

A banana split is made with good intentions: three scoops of ice cream, usually chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, rested on a fresh whole banana halved lengthwise and dressed with warmed chocolate syrup. As is frequently the case, nuts are optional.

Once removed from a freezer, ice cream tends to have a mind of its own, often melting at a rate more rapid -- no doubt encouraged by the residual heat of chocolate syrup -- than would allow most of us enjoying it at leisure. And around the fifth or sixth scoopful, a banana split usually becomes dessert soup.

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A. Scattergood

exterior of Black Cat Bakery

Black Cat Bakery & Cafe, the 2-year-old bakery and sandwich shop on Fairfax Avenue, has closed its doors permanently. Signs taped up on the windows apologized to the bakery's regulars, thanked them and cited "the current business climate" as the reason for the closing.

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Photo credit: BabycakesNYC

The rumors are true: Babycakes NYC in downtown L.A. has closed. "To free up some of our fine management crew and other resources we are unifying our two Los Angeles bakeries: Our Larchmont flagship will now be our sole Los Angeles storefront ... We are focusing on this positive note as our hearts heal for the 6th Street location that made BabyCakes possible in Los Angeles in the first place," the bakery announced on their blog.

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Clarissa Wei

Squid ink bread

At first glance, the pastry looks far from appetizing. The exterior is a steely black color and out from the middle, a green, mucus-like spread of garlic oozes out from the freshly baked crust. It's an ugly specimen of pastry -- but a cult-favorite among customers.

It's really just a glorified garlic bread, but the slightly briny flavor of squid ink makes all the difference. The formal title is the Japanese Calamari Stick, a squid ink-based bread stuffed with Vermont sharp cheddar cheese and a garlic spread on top. The best part? They're only 65-cents each. (Oh, and the squid ink. But we're admittedly biased.)

We finally got our hands on this elusive bread after an early morning visit to the 85°C Bakery Café's new West Covina location. Customers were stocking up on the pastry, often piling up more than five on their plates.

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Malcolm Bedell/From Away

A Fluffernutter made with Wonder Bread

We all knew, deep down, that Twinkies were indestructible and Wonder Bread was immortal.

Following Hostess Brands' recent bankruptcy, a Georgia-based company has stepped in and purchased several of Hostess' best-known brands, along with 28 bakeries and other locations, NBC News reports.

Flowers Foods, Inc., which makes the Nature's Own line of breads along with the Tastykake line of cupcakes and sweets, is buying Wonder, Nature's Pride, Merita, Home Pride and Butternut bread brands from Hostess for $360 million. Flowers also plans to buy the ailing bakery's Beefsteak Bread for an additional $30 million.

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J.Koslow

Bread from La Brea Bakery

La Brea Bakery, which closed its original bakery in November when the lease went to chef Walter Manzke, will reopen tomorrow in its new space in the Rita Flora building at 460 South La Brea Avenue.

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GuzzleandNosh

Rosca de Reyes at La Monarca

Huntington Park-based La Monarca Bakery, which now has four locations in the L.A. area, debuted its newest branch in Pasadena today.

The sprawling home-grown Mexican bakery, home to as wide an array of bollios, pan dulces, quiches, postres, tortas and any other Pan-Latin baked good you could hope for, is located on the Mission station of the Metro's Gold Line and next door to the Thursday night South Pasadena farmers market.

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A. Scattergood

Copenhagen Pastry's marzipan pig

There are many reasons to stop by Copenhagen Pastry, the bakery and retail shop in Culver City owned and operated by Danish native and longtime Angeleno Karen Hansen. The dark, seed-covered loaves of rye bread. The little bags of holiday sugar cookies. The LAMill coffee. The trays of freshly baked flødeboller and Napoleon hats and almond paste-filled kranse cakes in the enormous case. Since Hansen opened in June, the bakery has been turning out excellent pastries and baked goods in the ægte style of Hansen's homeland.

But in the next few days before Christmas, possibly the best reason to visit Copenhagen Pastry is the enormous marzipan pigs that Hansen has been selling. Imagine your favorite Charlotte's Web-style pig, made entirely out of almond paste and wrapped in a ribbon. What to do with these glorious pigs? Well, you can eat them whole in one sitting, as a certain 11-year-old girl will doubtless be doing when she finds one in her stocking next week.

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G. Snyder

Croissant at Maison Giraud

In his 1989 novel The Great Fire of London, renowned french author Jacques Roubaud spends a rather large section expounding the features of the ideal Parisian croissant, told in the kind of deliberate detail you'd expect from a professor of both poetry and advanced mathematics:

[T]he croissant that might be labeled the archetypal butter croissant, presents the following features: a very elongated rhombus, rounded at the tips but with an almost straight body (only the plain croissant, and it alone, has a lunar, ottomanlike look)--golden--plump--not too well-done--nor too white or starchy--staining your fingers through the India paper that wraps or rather holds it together--still warm (from the oven it's only recently left: not yet cooled) [...] It has three principal components, and three interlocking meaty compartments protected by a tender shell that lends it certain similarities to a young lobster.

It wasn't long ago that finding a great croissant, one that essentially resembled a fine slab of French butter empowered with crunch, flake, and tenderness, was a exercise that ended in either disappointment or compromise. Times have changed, it seems. After sampling a host of croissants from some of the most serious bakeries in L.A., we narrowed in down to the top three bakeries, all of which opened within the past year. Did 2012 mark the coming of the croissant renaissance?

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