Delightful Pastries
There are a lot of Polish bakers in Chicago, but Dobra Bielinski believes she’s one of the few doing things the right way. “No offense to other bakeries, but they skimp on ingredients,” she says. “I bought a cheesecake from one place and my dog refused to eat it.”
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Bielinski, 35, moved to Chicago from Poland with her family when she was 15. She graduated from Madonna High School for Girls and attended UIC, earning bachelor’s degrees in French and history and a master’s in U.S. foreign policy. But she was bored with academia. As an undergrad she’d spent a year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne and fallen in love with the city’s pastry shops, so rather than work toward a doctorate as she’d planned, she decided to change course entirely and enroll at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago.
The bakery’s glass display counter is typically filled with treats like Viennese almond crescents, Parisian macaroons, authentic tiramisu. But Bielinski’s heritage plays heavily in a lot of her recipes. “I’m American and Polish,” she says, “so we’ve got a fusion going on here.” She bakes desserts she says are too sweet for the Polish palate, like chocolate-chunk cookies and cream-cheese brownies, and the otherwise traditional Polish ambassador torte–a tall chocolate sponge cake filled with creme mousseline spiked with 95-proof grain alcohol–contains diced pineapple, mandarin oranges, and dried cranberries. “The Polish would use raisins,” Bielinski says, “but the cranberries give it a nice tartness.”
