Skies

I’ve previously written about Hamtramck, the city-within-a-city of Detroit that was once a Polish enclave, and is now an amazingly diverse community with strong Polish roots.  These roots are responsible for making the paczek a pre-Lenten staple throughout Southeast Michigan.  A donut about the size of two hockey pucks stacked on one another, it’s filled with fruit or custard—and has a remarkable following of prune devotees. A recent adaptation includes the Coney Island Hot Dog Paczek, where the coney hot dog (dog, chili, mustard, onions) is served in a paczek bun.

What Detroiters won’t do to food.

While it’s hard to not go a block without running into a store that sells paczki, Detroit proves to be a pretty tough sell when it comes to King Cake.  Best known in the New Orleans area, King Cake is a derivative of galette, the French cake used to celebrate Epiphany, or the twelfth day of Christmas.  As only New Orleans can do, King Cake is higher than galette, and decorated with lots of colored sugar—yellow, purple, and green.  A baby statue is baked into the cake, (some lawsuit-conscious bakers use an almond instead), and the person who gets the slice with the insert has to buy the next King Cake.

A colleague at my former school is from New Orleans, so I thought it might be nice to bring a little of home to their workplace.  After some serious research that paralleled parts of the investigations for my PhD, I finally found a bakery that made King Cake in the Detroit area.  Well, sort of.  More like a 75-minute drive from downtown.

That’s what led me to get up at an unusual hour one Sunday morning to make the trek for King Cake, since the bakery was closed Monday, and the cake had to be delivered early Tuesday morning.  Happily, the route to the bakery was all interstate, roads we make very wide in Detroit for obvious reasons.  Given my journey was Sunday morning, this promised to be a wide-open adventure.

And there it was.

Michigan’s weather is famous for changing in a heartbeat, something you quickly come to expect from a piece of land that is surrounded by the five largest freshwater bodies in the world. Depending on the wind and other competing forces, Michigan has more than its share of days where the high is at midnight, and the temperature is 40 degrees cooler by the next midnight.  At least two winter days offer the full menu of precipitation, from snow to rain to hail to sleet to freezing rain, a fascinating mix, since most meteorologists will tell you sleet is freezing rain.  The sayings about weather in Michigan are true—if you don’t like the weather right now, either wait five minutes, or cross the street.

None of that, or any of my weather experiences as a lifelong Michigander, prepared me for Sunday.  I came off the onramp into the gulf of concrete that is I-75, and there was this curtain of frozen water droplets as far up and beyond as the eye could see, all of them suspended in midair.  Like the sheerest of sequined curtains at a Broadway show, this magnificent ribbon of precipitation (which I later discovered is called frozen fog) simply stood there, turning in the bright February sun Michigan gets about three days a year, welcoming me to my journey on this huge, empty road.

Turns out I didn’t miss church after all.

I’m thinking I need to get back to that bakery soon.

Irish soda bread, anyone?

True Olympic Gold

Not grueling training
Or shiny gold—but rather
Soft podium joy.

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