We started out in Hamtramck, ground zero for Paczki Day. We drove past old Martha Washington Bakery and although the line was shorter than usual-- it was because the windchill was 10 below zero-- yeah no thanks, so we decided to skip that spot this year.
Drove by the place where we used to get our paczki, which shut its doors a year or two ago. We rolled through the streets to the bakery where found our first batch of paczki— Bozek’s Market.
We pulled up, strolled in, and made our way to the paczki. We picked out all the flavors they had, one of each & made note of the flavors they didn’t have so we could track them down.
On the search for chocolate paczki, we set out to try Donut Villa in Southwest Detroit. We had stopped in last week to grab some doughnuts and they were really fresh and tasted good so we thought we’d give them a try.
The place was filled with regulars, but the display case was filled with newcomers-- paczki instead of doughnuts today.
We asked about the chocolate paczki and were told that that’s the first flavor they sold out of this morning! They said we could try back later this afternoon because they were going to try to make more. We opted for the custard filled paczki instead.
We had to get the kids to school because although Paczki Day is a holiday in our family, I don’t like the missing more than a half day off for this excursion.
We dropped one of the girls off at school and on the way to drop the second one off- we had an idea. So we turned around and drove to another store nearby in the hopes they would have done remaining chocolate custard paczki before dropping her off.
Success! They had chocolate packzki so we threw some in a bag and made our way, once again, back to the school.
And then we came home and ate some packzki. (Well, the ones we didn’t eat in the car)
The kids came home later and the smell of fresh paczki greeted them at the door. Then they sat down & stuffed their sweet faces with one of every flavor. We usually cut them so we can try all the flavors but y’know— everyone has their favorite. There was rose paczki, lemon, blueberry, prune, apple, raspberry, strawberry— any flavor you can imagine. The list goes on & on.
We ate our entire haul of paczki by the afternoon. Not joking. The bags and boxes are piled up-- a stack of deflated bags and empty boxes.
And then there were none.