Gastronomical Exploration: Carol's Pastry Shop

The only way I would've found this place was through the web. It came up in the list of bakeries and pastry shops in Salt Lake on Google. I thought the address to be strange...it wasn't on a major street of any sorts, almost like in the middle of an obscure neighborhood. But it wasn't far away, so I made a trip to go there.

Indeed, it was in the middle of an obscure residential area.

I passed by it several times before I finally located it. It was in the middle of an alleyway, behind a residential house. There was a delivery truck parked right in front of the entrance. You can see the door almost obstructed from view....

With only a very simple sign that says, "Carol's Pastry Shop", this was very easy to miss.
Now a little skeptical, I opened the entrance....only to be blasted by the sweet smell of vanilla and baked goods. There goes my skepticism.

Inside was more like a factory. The "storefront" consisted of a wall decorated with old newspaper articles about this place and antique trinkets (the only part of the store that was decorated at all) and a very small display case, filled with simple, basic pastries: cookies, brownies, cupcakes, napoleons, eclairs, etc.

The frame next to the painting says, "Give us this day, our daily bread." (I wonder if they're Christians...??) This place just had this warm, inviting feeling and I couldn't help but smile. :)

The other display case had whole pies and cakes. Right next to that....was the biggest oven I've ever seen.

There was an elderly gentleman with a hunched back spreading what looked like chocolate fudge into a sheet pan (turned out to be brownies). He carried the tray over to the oven and placed it on the rack.
Dazzled by the whole scenery, I asked for a tour of their "factory", after purchasing a cream puff, a napoleon, and a chocolate cupcake. They were very kind and showed me around. The racks in the giant oven were rotating like a ferris-wheel. The oven was set at 350F. They said it surprisingly doesn't take too long to preheat the oven.
Then I spotted a machine that looked like a blender with a metal spout. Turned out it was a machine for piping cream into eclairs. A guy there did a demo for me and filled an eclair and smeared it with chocolate glaze. He then said, "Here you can have this one" and gave me the freshly filled eclair!
I thanked them for the eclair and the tour. These people definitely won me over.

Back at home....I now had four pastries to sample. I decided to have the eclair and the cream puff for lunch, and the napoleon and the cupcake for dinner.

These turned out to be the best choux pastries I've ever had in Salt Lake. It was buttery and tender...and almost flaky. The cream inside the cream puff was, unfortunately, probably the canned stuff, and the raspberry filling wasn't made from scratch. The cream in the eclair was a regular vanilla pastry cream, (they actually said they use the mix) but good flavor for what it is. I still wonder about Leslie's strangely buttery eclair cream filling. Overall, pretty good.

Now the cupcake on the other hand...quite dry. The frosting was smooth, and the flavor was your average chocolate cupcake. I don't know if this was an overbaked batch or it simply sat on the display case too long. I'll try it again just to verify.

The napoleon was very good! It was filled with whipped cream on the upper layer, with pastry cream and raspberry on the bottom. I like this one a whole lot better than Leslie's (which had been filled with the same, strangely buttery cream as their eclairs).

I'm so glad to have found this little gem. This was a great experience, in this day and age when the Mom-&-Pop shops like this one are quickly disappearing. And the best part? The pastries are $0.80 each. :)