Bakery

The gig: Owner of Rossmoor Pastries, one of the region's largest independent commercial bakeries. It supplies pastries, cakes and other baked goods to large clients, including Disneyland, Staples Center, Angel Stadium, Universal Studios and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Some big projects : Created a gingerbread version of Staples Center that was rolled out to center court during halftime of a Los Angeles Lakers game. Baked a 5-foot-tall birthday cake for pop star Miley Cyrus.

Scones are one of the basic pleasures in life. Like biscuits with a touch of added sweetness, the best scones are delicate and light yet somehow wonderfully rich, each bite suggesting bits of butter that have all but disappeared, leaving behind tender, flaky layers. A scone is a singular work of art, yet any sweet or savory flavorings just add to the magic. And as hard as it may be to resist a beautiful scone in a bakery display case, nothing beats the flavor of homemade. Like biscuits, scones are part of the quick bread family, rustic cousins to more refined pastries and cakes.

The revolution has not yet come to Milad Zari's bakery. Cairo is raging in protest. Tanks rumble past buildings aflame. But down an alley, just beyond the city of the dead, where the poor live scattered amid forgotten graves, Zari bakes bread. He works from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., earning less than $90 a month to pay the rent and raise six children. It has been this way for 20 years, his hands, quick as sparrows, feeding flat dough into an oven. "How can I go into the street and protest?"

Dear SOS: I was recently in Atlanta visiting a friend. She took me to Highland Bakery, where I had the most delicious sweet potato pancakes. Can you please try to get the recipe? Thank you so much. Stacy Wawerchak Redondo Beach Dear Stacy: Fresh off the griddle, these warm and tempting sweet potato pancakes are lightly spiced and deliciously aromatic. You could top them with maple syrup, but they're best drizzled with Highland Bakery's rich praline-like brown sugar butter sauce.

My wife and I were shocked to read about the impending closure of Erika's Bake Shop. The 25-year-old bakery, which the family has owned for 22 years, closes to make way for a Blockbuster Video store. Don't we have enough video stores already? We need more bakeries like Erika's, not video stores selling filmed violence to an already [violence-]prone society? How can our nation tout enterprise and initiative of the small businessman when national corporations are usurping our nation's economy?

Is it well done or half-baked? The latest thing to come out of Los Angeles' landmark Van de Kamp's bakery isn't to everyone's taste. The Los Angeles Community College District has completed a $72-million renovation of the Glassell Park home of the now-defunct Dutch-themed bakery that was known for its windmill-shaped cookies and Danish pastries. But budgetary problems have prevented district officials from opening a college satellite campus at the 4-acre site near Fletcher Drive and San Fernando Road as they had planned.

"Have you been to Porto's yet?" Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia remembers friends asking when he'd just moved to L.A. in 1978. For transplanted Cubans in those days, the small family-run bakery's flaky guava-cheese pastries, papa rellenas and other Cuban specialties were as close to a taste of their homeland as they could get.

Waiting for my order at Huckleberry in Santa Monica, I watch the line move, slowly, forward. Ballet flats, flip-flops, bicycle cleats, and Nikes, Manolos, and sturdy walking shoes and even a tiptoeing cane inch their way to the cash register. Sometimes at lunch the line is out the door, snaking past the tall wooden planters filled with herbs and greens and tomatoes, all the way into the parking lot in back.

When is a sprinkle more than icing on the cake? Apparently when you're a much-imitated Beverly Hills bakery. Sprinkles, the chain that started in 2005 and became a favorite of Oprah Winfrey and Paris Hilton, is suing Famous Cupcakes in West Hollywood. Sprinkles claims Famous Cupcakes is stealing its "modern dot" trademark, that circle-on-a-circle, color-coded piece of candy that tops every Sprinkles cupcake and helps distinguish a Red Velvet, say, from a Chai Latte. Famous Cupcakes opened six months ago and uses dots as a motif on its packaging, in its store and on its website, though owner Desiree Adl said her cupcakes have no dots.

The quintessential Paris experience is to enter a boulangerie , inhale the heavenly smell of fresh bread and buy a baguette for an impromptu picnic on the Seine. Now imagine stuffing a euro into a vending machine that dispenses warm baguettes with all the cachet of an ATM machine. Talk about a buzz kill. French baker Jean-Louis Hecht calls his new baguette vending machine the "bakery of tomorrow," according to this Associated Press story. He has installed two vending machines so far -- one in Paris, one in a northeastern town called Hombourg-Haut -- that spit out hot bread for a Euro (about $1.42)

A Pennsylvania bakery teased by presidential candidate Mitt Romney for cookies that looked like “they came from the local 7-Eleven bakery” has turned a joke that fell flat into a marketing opportunity. During a campaign event in Bethel Park, Pa., this week, Romney sat down with locals, took a look at the cookies they'd baked for him and offered a joking response. “I'm not sure about these cookies. Did you make those cookies?” he asked the women around him. “You didn't, did you?

Pastry obsessives might have an affinity for layer cakes, fruit tarts or croissants, and may even know where to score kouign amann (the caramelized Breton pastry). Filipino silvanas and Danishes by way of Taiwan are probably a taller order. How about warm Persian sangak slathered with cultured cream and honey? Or the Chilean cake brazo de reina filled with dulce de leche ? Here are some bakeries from recent Find columns at which to get your beyond-chocolate-chip-cookies fix. - Linda Burum, Miles Clements, Betty Hallock and C. Thi Nguyen Chilenazo Baker Ruben Villaruel is baking more than Chilenazo's sturdy buns - the foundation of the Chilean cafe's hefty sandwiches.

If you aren't up to speed on what the Transportation Security Administration has labeled Cupcakegate , here's a quick synopsis . Traveler Rebecca Hains of Peabody, Mass., last month had a cupcake confiscated as she passed through airport security at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. The TSA maintains the cupcake raised suspicions because it came in a jar and contained "gel-like" frosting that was deemed to have exceeded the 3-ounce limit. Enter the TSA Compliant Cupcake, a new product from Silver Spoon Bakery in Providence, R.I. "We wanted to take a tongue-in-cheek look at what the ideal cupcake would be to be TSA compliant," Silver Spoon owner Kelly Colgan says Thursday.

When reader Jefferson Davis wrote Culinary SOS asking for help finding a recipe, he didn't mince words: "The apple butter cake at Huckleberry is the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. I can't stop thinking about the taste. I would do anything for the recipe, including washing dishes there for the day. It's that good. " And he's not exaggerating. We tested this recipe over and over — not because there was anything wrong with it, but because we couldn't get enough. It has a dense, crumbly texture from almond meal and cornmeal and a rich flavor from plenty of butter.

Dear SOS: I am in love with a cookie from Euro Pane in Pasadena. It is the mocha cookie. We were in the restaurant last weekend, and I asked for the recipe, and they laughed at me. I thought you might have a better chance. Thanks, Lisa Richmon Hawthorne Dear Lisa: It's love at first bite with these cookies! Crisp yet chewy and oh-so wonderfully rich, there's no shortage of chocolate in Euro Pane's mocha cookie recipe (it includes a shot of espresso, which helps to deepen the flavor of the chocolate)

The owner and the manager of a French restaurant in San Diego were sentenced in federal court Thursday to serve probation and pay fines after pleading guilty to knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants. Michel Malecot, 59, the owner of French Gourmet, was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay $396,575 in fines, authorities said. Richard Kauffmann, 59, the manager, was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $2,500 for his role in hiring the undocumented immigrants to work in the restaurant's bakery and catering businesses.

We enjoyed Jerry Hulse's article on Kauai (Sept. 25). However, we would like to add one other eating experience on the island. The banana and macadamia nut pancakes at the Tip Top Cafe and Bakery, Tip Top Motel, are the best we have ever eaten. The cafe is in downtown Lihue on Elua Street. DIANE and KENT CULLEN Santa Barbara

Along with the tagliatelle, pizza and fettuccine alfredo, customers at the famous Sarno's Caffe Dell'Opera Wednesday helped themselves to large servings of tears, hugs and "I remember when" stories about owner Alberto Sarno, who was gunned down in his front yard Tuesday morning. Old Italian men from the neighborhood, lunching businessmen and music lovers stepped into the dimly lit restaurant to give condolences and reflect on the life of one of the city's best-known opera promoters.

Chocolate-chocolate cookies, compost cookies (made with potato chips, pretzels, butterscotch chips, graham cracker crumbs, etc.), blueberries and cream cookies, banana cream pie, brownie pie, hot fudge sauce, chocolate cake. I can't stop baking from "Momofuku Milk Bar," written by pastry chef Christina Tosi. The truth is, I think I take a lot more pleasure out of baking from the book than I ever did from stopping by the East Village bakery in New York. Maybe at least partly because these home-baked versions come with a dose of accomplishment, a testament to the recipes: The sweets turn out as good as the bakery's.

After Thursday's extravaganza, it might be the right time to think about the lightest meal of the day - or the meal that affords us the rest of the day to burn off some calories, anyway. Forget pancakes. How about savory Taiwanese crullers dipped in super-fresh soy milk, house-made longaniza sausage with eggs, sweet Belizean ducunu (they're like logs of unfilled tamale made with fresh corn grated off the cob) or poached-egg soup with hand-patted tortillas? Whether on La Brea Avenue or Bolsa Avenue, early-morning options abound.