Credit: Photo by John Anderson

Bakerman’s Patisserie and Chocolatier

120 E. Seventh (at Brazos), 476-0060
Monday-Friday, 7am-4pm; Saturday, 9am-3pm
www.bakermansbakery.com

Award-winning chef/chocolatiers Jeffrey Ontiveros and Hope Arabie took over this Downtown bakery in August 2007; they offer luscious pastries, specialty and wedding cakes, sandwiches, artisan chocolate bonbons, and chocolate showpieces. San Antonio native Ontiver­os graduated from the Culinary Institute of America pastry program in New York and taught pastry at the Texas Culinary Academy in Austin for five years. Arabie, a native of New Orleans, graduated from TCA. Both competed in national-level professional pastry competitions in 2007.

Bakerman’s uses imported Bel­gian and French couverture, and all their bonbons are hand-rolled, -dipped, and -molded and individually filled and finished. The chocolatiers are inspired by venerable traditions of European confectionery, and they strive to create products as rich in flavor as they are in history.

For Valentine’s Day, Bakerman’s is offering a variety of holiday chocolate treats, including an edible chocolate box that is personalized with names and contains six double-chocolate truffles brushed in gold and two white-chocolate-and-passion-fruit truffles ($35). They also have assortment boxes of four, six, and 12 truffles ($8, $12, $24 respectively) that you can select from their wide choice of flavors.

Bakerman’s chocolates are available via phone, e-mail, and at the Downtown location. – MM Pack

This article appears in February 8 • 2008.

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Mexico City native Claudia Alarcón has made Austin home since 1984. She worked her way through college in the local restaurant industry, graduating from the University of Texas in 1999. She has been a Chronicle contributor for 15 years and presents lectures and workshops on topics related to the foodways of Mexico, both locally and internationally.

MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.

Mick Vann is a retired Austin chef who is a food writer and restaurant critic, cookbook author, restaurant consultant, and recipe developer. He moonlights as a University of Texas horticulturist with a propensity for ethnic eats and international food, particularly of the Asian persuasion, but he also knows his way around a plate of soul food or barbecue.