Let's do lunch....

or breakfast....or stop off for a pastry....

Joe,Jasper and I went to Florene's Bakery for breakfast Sunday morning. We were able to support a local business, see my good friend Brandy and enjoy an awesome breakfast all in one fell swoop.


Florene's Bakery
This quaint bakery and restaurant is located on the South side of Des Moines. They offer a small breakfast menu with items rich in real butter. Seriously it says so right on their menu.
We started our breakfast with a nice cup of coffee and orange juice. The coffee was pretty good which was a pleasant suprise.
I asked our server (my friend Brandy) what she would eat if she was going to have breakfast. She was no help in narrowing down the options, it seems everything was worth trying.
Joe went with the biscuits and gravy. I was going for the pancakes before I changed my mind at the last minute and ordered 3 eggs with freshly made toast( I choose pumpernickel onion),a sausage patty, and hash browns. If I wanted to I could have substituted my toast for something from the pastry counter for only a $1.00 more.
The biscuits and gravy where hands down the best we've ever had. The biscuits were rich and soft and the gravy was thick and flavorful. I wasn't that impressed with the scrambled eggs or the hash browns, the eggs were a little to moist for my taste and the hash browns could have been cooked longer. The sausage patty was tasty though and the bread...well it is a bakery...the bread was dense and moist and flavorful. Delicious!
After breakfast we decided to take a few things with us for later. I got 4 dutch letter 'toes', a bag of 2 ginger cookies with icing, and 2 sticky buns.
The sticky buns were good, but for the amount of butter they use in everything, I expected them to be a bit softer. The 'goo' had light molasses flavor and was well caramelized.
The ginger cookies were awesome. They were the real deal as far as ginger goes. I'm guessing they use real ginger extract or even crystallized ginger that they've blending to a pulp in these as the flavor was intense, almost hot on some bites. The cookie itself was perfect, soft and chewy on the inside, with a hard crunchy icing top. In fact I wish I had another one right now!
All in all, I would say that Florene's is definitely worth a trip to the South side.