New Palace Bakery | Detroit’s Polish Pastries At Their Best

A Hamtramck Treasure

The New Palace Bakery is a vestige of a tradition in the Hamtramck neighborhood: a delightful taste of Detroit’s Polish pastries at its best. Its cases brim with donuts, cookies and Good Friday paczki (basically jelly donuts). On Paczki Day (Fat Tuesday), the bakery opens at 3 a.m. to give Catholic customers a fighting chance to beat the lines of everyday donut hounds.

Low Cost, High Calorie Delights

Even on a normal day, the bounty of paczki, among other of Detroit’s Polish pastries is head-spinning enough to keep adding more full boxes to your order. It’s no problem for the wallet; everything is pretty inexpensive. The waistband is another story.

What Exactly Is A Paczki?

The paczki are what the bakery is best known for. They are like a more generously filled donut-shop jelly-filled with eggy, enriched dough. However, we think the cookies, particularly the kolaczki, are the best thing to get.  They are what Jewish bakers might call rugelach: a cookie dough with cream cheese filled with a little bit of jam. The spots of jam are spot on, and make every cookie, or paczki, that much better. We are also very impressed by the large linzer cookie/coconut macaroon hybrid. The coconut cookie rests on top of a butter cookie base with a thumbprint of raspberry jam in the center. It is delicious, and unlike anything we’ve seen.

Next Visit: Cookies!

The bakery suffers a bit for its ambitious inventory. The pazcki are tasty, but some of the donuts and cream puffs can taste a bit old. It’s the more durable items, like cookies, that are great. For our next visit, we’ll ask what has come out of the oven recently and load up on cookies. Whatever you get here, you will leave a trail of powdered sugar down the road.