With the holiday season here, there might be a few extra guests around the house over the next few weeks.
This week, NBC Chicago's Food Guy, Steve Dolinsky, offers a couple of suggestions for crowd-pleasing desserts.
After you’ve indulged in all those traditional Thanksgiving pies, maybe you’re looking for something a little bit different this holiday season. I’d suggest you look South, around 35th Street.
Kristoffer Chavarria grew up in the baking business. His parents even named their store after him, somehow hoping one day, the namesake would take over Kristoffer’s Cakes in McKinley Park.
They built their reputation on chocoflan and tres leches, which traditionally contain sweetened condensed and evaporated milk, plus half-and-half or heavy cream. His interest in baking quickly led to more creative flavors like caramel or pumpkin spice.
“After that, it gave me kind of like a fire, to start branching out to new ideas like Oreo, mango,” said Chavarria.
After baking, the tops are removed with a special saw, then the flavored milk combo is poured into every crevice and the cakes soak overnight, absorbing all of that liquid while maintaining their shape. Next day, mom and dad help frost and garnish the cakes, portioning them into individually sold slices too. They also offer a dynamite carrot cake, and that chocoflan is still one of the city’s best.
“It’s a custard-like flan with a moist chocolate cake on the bottom,” he said.
On the edge of Douglas and Bronzeville, Classic Cobbler recently opened its doors, offering several sizes of cobbler that can feed anywhere from two to twelve people.
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“So at Classic Cobbler, we specialize in fruit cobblers. Our signature peach cobbler, pies and puddings,” said Branarla Johnson, owner of Classic Cobbler.
With larger sized pans, Johnson says cobblers tend to get messy, so she does some pre-baking, before fruit is added.
“And one of the secrets to our cobblers is we put the crust at the bottom and we bake that prior to baking our cobblers,” she said.
Johnson also bakes lots of pies, such as sweet potato and pecan, but cobblers are her forte, and she’s adamant about her baking technique.
What we do is we cook our cobbler with the crust, so it doesn’t get too soggy. That’s why people talk about peaches are too mushy. So we try to make sure we maintain the texture of our fruits,” she said.
Kristoffer’s always has cakes in their case but call ahead for a specific flavor. For cobblers, you’ll definitely need to pre-order, especially if it’s a larger size.
1735 W.35th St.
773-801-1831
3453 S. Prairie Ave.
312-763-3100
