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Eight hundred kilos of flour. 4 hundred kilos of butter. 300 kilos of sugar.
That’s what Carl Birkholm makes use of every week to create the hundreds of eye-popping, mouthwatering candy treats that line the glass bakery circumstances at Birkholm’s Bakery and Café in Solvang. Napoleons, macaroons, eclairs, bear claws, cream puffs, breads and, after all, Danish pastries and cookies all make for pleasant indecision and anxiousness.
Fortunately, all clients are ultimately cured with the primary chew.
Birkholm and his crew start every day at 4 a.m. within the again room with combining components in large mixing bowls and utilizing manufacturing methods that combine each fashionable machines and positive hand work.
“All the pieces is comprised of scratch,” Birkholm says as he offers us a tour of the operation. “Through the holidays, we promote 600 buckets of (Danish butter) cookies every week.”
Birkholm’s father, additionally Carl, established this bakery — Solvang’s first — shortly after immigrating from Denmark in 1951. Birkholm nonetheless has his father’s hand-written recipe ebook that he carried from his homeland, and he’ll likewise move it alongside to his son, Carl, who’s already working a very good portion of the enterprise.
“The recipes are the identical excluding some modifications over time,” Birkholm says. “As an example, we don’t use trans fat anymore.”
Additionally a nod to altering occasions: gluten-free confections like almond horns and macaroons.
Birkholm additionally credit his father for selling the customized of adorning the city’s buildings with white lights all year long, as is finished within the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, and the requirement that new building have to be within the Outdated World Danish model.
Esther Jacobsen Bates’ father arrived in Solvang from Denmark about the identical time as Birkholm’s father. He arrived with “a way of journey, a want for extra alternative and a job on his uncle’s dairy farm in Solvang.”
Right now, as the manager director of the Elverhoj Museum (pronounced EL-ver-hoy), Bates is the city’s chief keeper of its cultural heritage, which is defined by means of the museum’s many reveals. Lovely and colourful hand-crafted artifacts introduced and created by Solvang’s Danish immigrants inform of a tough life, largely constructed across the space’s early dairy farms.
“One factor that I by no means anticipated was that my Danish heritage would develop into an asset to my job,” Bates says. “I get to work with the Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C., and promote Danish tradition across the U.S. It’s been useful to the museum. (As an example), the data panels have been initially part of a show at Ellis Island.”
The museum constructing itself is an ideal instance of conventional Danish structure. “Referred to as bindingsværk or ‘half-timber’ building, it was standard in Denmark as early because the sixteenth century,” Bates says. “It makes use of brick or plaster to fill within the openings between the timbers.”
It’s additionally a problem to protect and preserve due to the climate, she provides.
Solvang and the Santa Ynez Valley didn’t go instantly from dairy farming to vineyards.
“I labored within the wine trade the place there have been 4 wineries within the early ’70s,” Bates recollects. “The trade took off within the early 2000. Within the final 20 years, there are various areas which were planted with wine grapes that in any other case weren’t.”
For no matter purpose guests come to Solvang, Bates encourages a cease on the museum.
“Our visitors particularly like studying how Solvang started and the way it advanced to develop into the Danish Capital of America,” she says. “We discover that after individuals go to the museum, they go downtown and think about it by means of a distinct lens.”
Bonus: “Legacy of Decency: Rembrandt, Jews and Danes,” an exhibition of 21 etchings by Dutch Grasp Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669). The etchings are paired with shows concerning the Danish rescue of their Jewish inhabitants throughout World Struggle II.
For extra, see Visit Santa Ynez Valley.
For extra photographs and commentary, go to facebook.com/elouise.ondash.
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