Every day for the next 20 days (enough for both the twelve days of Christmas plus the eight crazy nights of Hanukkah) we’ll highlight a choice Roadfood-themed item that's available by mail. Each of the items we showcase will make wonderful holiday gifts, and can also help make for an extra-festive holiday table for you and your guests.  So lets get started with gift idea #1:

What better way to begin our 20 Days, 20 Gifts series than to feature the pastry with the Christmas name! Kringle is the specialty of the Danish-American city of Racine, WI. So just what is this thing called kringle? As you can see in the photo above, it is an oval pastry. What’s not visible, however, is just how buttery and flaky this foot-and-a-half-wide pastry is. Kringles can be filled with fruit or nuts, or sweet cheese or chocolate, but the most popular flavor is pecan, with good reason. A pecan kringle is one of America’s great breakfast pastries! Kringle is best served warm, with a pot of coffee. If your experience with Danish pastries is limited to the dry, bready things served at morning office meetings, accompanied by Bunn-O-Matic coffee, then you are in for a real treat. Warm kringle would be most welcome on a chilly Christmas morning.

Racine’s kringle bakeries are well-equipped for shipping kringle to customers all over the country. They freeze beautifully too. But keep in mind that these are local bakeries with small capacity, so there’s a limit to the number of holiday orders they can satisfy. It’s best to plan as far ahead as possible so you don’t get shut out. Bendtsen’s Bakery (see the Roadfood.com review) is one of our favorite kringle bakeries. An order of three kringles, with ground shipping, will run about $44, but air shipping is probably a better idea (freshness!). Kringle and air will run about $65 through Bendtsen’s.