In the small town where I grew up, there was a bakery, with very ordinary pastries (it was as different from other bakeries of it ilk as one McDonalds is from another McDonalds). We almost never bought anything there--my mother was an excellent baker. My favorite homemade pastry was potica, a Croatian yeast bread dough rolled around a sweetened walnut filling (like a jelly roll), which my mother's mother in Wyoming would send us each Christmas, along with some little garlicky smoked sausage links (which sometimes did not survive the long, unrefrigerated journey in the mail). Our simple Christmas morning breakfast was even more memorable than the elaborate dinner later in the day. After my grandmother died, my mother decided to make potica herself, and improved on the original recipe by adding more of the walnut filling (my grandmother's potica had a tiny layer of filling and tended to be dry). The improved version was moist and yeasty, with just the right amount of sweetness, perfect with coffee.

In the even smaller town where I live now, there was (briefly thank goodness) a very distinctive bakery. It was combined with a dry cleaners (I am not kidding), and the pastries tasted like dry cleaning fluid (or what I think dry cleaning fluid would taste like, based on the smell).

The best store-bought pastry I ever had (fried, not baked) was a cruller from a little donut shop in Tallahassee. Fresh, sweet, and crispy on the outside / eggy on the inside, like perfected French toast.

Your food recollections always make me both reflective and hungry--a very interesting state.