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Tasty Pastries: Chocolate Soup Pastry kitchen’s lisa Ciraldo rolls out creations at her Mount Werner bakery.
Best Bakery: Chocolate Soup Pastry Kitchen Pastry chef Lisa Ciraldo shares the secrets of her bakery’s sweets
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on’t ever tell Lisa Ciraldo a cookie is just a cookie. The Chocolate Soup Pastry Kitchen owner knows that to be deemed a success, a cookie needs to release a taste of something more complex than sugar or spice when it’s eaten. It needs to release a memory. Many of Ciraldo’s cookies are designed to take her taste buds back to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx of New York, where as a child she’d gorge on cannolis, Italian biscuits and black-and-white cookies with her father. “The flavor of the cookies in these bakeries was always a big thing for us,” she says in her kitchen at the base of Mount Werner as she carefully pours apricot jam into a batch of almond spritz cookies. “There was always a good consistency in
these bakeries and a family feeling. The feelings and the smells are stuck in my heart, and I think of my father when I make them.” With a degree in biology from Colorado State University and a pastry degree from Johnson & Wales University, Ciraldo says her cookies are the product of carefully crafted chemistry, not unmeasured dashes of common materials. Each of her baked goods originates from formulas scribbled in the big recipe books she carries that contain step-by-step instructions for how to make delicacies that date back to her childhood. She jokes that she’s always been in the “sweets business,” starting with her first job at a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop at age 13. Today, she says she’s happy to have
Story by Scott Franz ❘ Photos by John F. Russell 30 | STEAmbOAT living | Spring 2012
turned her passion into a successful Yampa Valley business. “I love that people think of Chocolate Soup as ‘the bakery,’” she says. “We take a lot of pride in what we make.” Chocolate Soup, which Ciraldo opened five years ago to fill a void she said was created by the absence of a true bakery in town, currently caters desserts and breads to nine local vendors. In September, the bakery started to sell its milk chocolate almond and dark chocolate pistachio macaroons and Bella Luna graham crackers to Rocky Mountain region Whole Foods stores. It since has expanded its wholesale operation. “I decided to make this town my home base because I saw an opening for a niche, and we decided to fill it,” she says. “I hope we’re succeeding.”