Home for Christmas: Milwaukee Bakery Tour

It has been nearly two weeks since we left our Little Dutch House to begin our journey home for the Holidays.  We have been busily making most of our trip ever since.  Since our return, we have been reunited with Bailey, decorated our Christmas tree, finished our Christmas shopping, opened the Christmas cards and packages that were waiting for us, wrapped Christmas gifts, celebrated the season with friends and family, caught up on some television and movies, made visits to doctors and dentists, gotten our "hairs did", taken a failing computer in to be backed up...and appreciated every minute of time spent HERE...at HOME.  Even now, at this moment, as I sit in a freezing house, waiting for our furnace to be repaired (Our furnace decided to stop providing heat this morning.), I am STILL grateful that we are home. 

Even better yet, it looks like we'll be staying HOME an additional week!  Our original plan to fly back to the Netherlands on January 4th was changed when it was confirmed that Jim would need to stick around for a meeting on the 6th.  We're now looking at flying back on January 11th!  

My computer is up and running again (though I suspect I don't have long with it), Jim made me a warm fire, and the twins are sleeping, so I thought I'd sit down and catch up on the ol' blog!

On Saturday, December 21st, I joined my good friends Jenny and Shelly for a bus tour of several of Milwaukee's best bakeries.   A school bus carried us from one "sweet spot" to another.  At the end of the tour, we were stuffed to the gills with cookies, cannolis, cupcakes, chocolate covered pretzels, and other sweets!  It was the perfect way to celebrate Christmas with such "sweet" friends!

At Chris' suggestion, the girls and I decided to reserve places on the Christmas Around Milwaukee Bakery Bus Tour  as offered by Milwaukee Food and City Tours in lieu of our annual Christmas dinner.  Last summer, Chris and I had taken a photo walk through the same company.

Although she had suggested the tour, Chris was unable to join us on Saturday when her husband Mike came down with the stomach flu early that morning.  Chris stayed home to take care of him and their baby Ben.   She's a good wife and Mama!

Our tour guide entertained most of those on the tour with stories from her childhood and tidbits of information about Christmas traditions from around the world.  Those of us at the back of the bus preferred to talk amongst ourselves and catch air when the bus drove over bumps in the road.

Shelly hooked us up with festive headbands and necklaces for the tour.  We wore them proudly.

Since there were so many people on our tour, we had to visit a few of the smaller bakeries in shifts.  Some of the group were dropped off at one bakery while the rest of us waited to be taken to another. 

Our first stop was Eastside Ovens, where we sampled almond fingers and gingerbread and bought some sugar cookie cut-outs.

As disturbing as this picture may be, you will be even MORE disturbed to know that Shelly replaced this cookie on the tray after posing for the picture.

Just kidding, of course.  I wouldn't be friends with anyone who would do such a thing.

We headed next to Canfora bakery to take in the sights and smells of freshly baked pizza, bread, and cookies.  

We were given samples of Canfora's pizza, which is baked and sold every Saturday.  We also tried their delicious Spumoni cookies.  After sampling those, we each purchased several more to take home with us.  The  half-dozen Spumoni cookies that I brought home lasted two days before all that we had left were crumbs...and the sweet, scrumptious memories.

These Santa and snowmen chocolates were too cute to pass up.  

Next up was National Bakery Deli, the 2013 WISN A-List Award Winner for Best Bakery.  

National Bakery & Deli provided ham sandwiches for those people on the food tour.  We saved our sandwiches and ate them for lunch after the tour had ended!

I contemplated bringing two of these cookies home for the twins, but then decided that we were all better off if I simply took a picture of them!

From Canfora, we traveled to Wauwatosa, where the bus dropped us off to visit four different stops on our own - Simma's Bakery, Ultimate Confections, La Tarte, and Rose's Flower Shop.

Simma's was crowded with regular customers ordering Christmas cakes and tasting wedding cakes.  Jenny and I spent quite a bit of time waiting in line to pay for the goodies that we were buying.  

Aren't these snowmen cute?  

After staying too long in Simma's, we didn't have much time to shop at the other three stores.  Thank goodness for friends like Shelly who collected my free sample of a chocolate-covered pretzel while I putzed around with my camera outside Ultimate Confections!

Our last "sweet spot" before we returned to Stone Creek Coffee was Milwaukee Cupcake Company.  By the time that we boarded the bus for the last time, we were all feeling a little green after all the sugar that we had consumed!

After some ham sandwiches and a few glasses of water, we were good as new and ready to take our traditional Christmas picture!