You can spot it from afar, with its candy-pink façade, pink tables and chairs, a pink bicycle, and flowers framing its doors and windows.
By LAHAV HARKOVOr Shpitz Bakery, Tel Aviv(photo credit: Lahav Harkov)
Or Shpitz Bakery looks like no place else in Tel Aviv – maybe even in all of Israel. You can spot it from afar, with its candy-pink façade, pink tables and chairs, a pink bicycle, and flowers framing its doors and windows.The bakery looks exactly like what it is: the perfect place for a tea party with a little girl – or the young at heart – with the most sinfully sweet treats you can imagine.When you enter, there’s a wall of pink flowers and a pink sofa. When you sit down, there’s a pink wall full of gilded mixers at the other side of the room. If you’re lucky enough to get a spot of the bakery’s Instagram-star owner, she’ll be wearing pink, as well.“Pink is optimistic, pretty and fun,” Shpitz said of her signature color. “It’s part of the concept and the branding. When people see me and I’m not wearing pink, they’re disappointed!”Shpitz, 23, started baking as a teenager, preparing colorful, fancy birthday cakes for people in her neighborhood in Holon, keeping the business going while she served in the IDF and advertising her cakes on her popular Instagram account. When she was 20 – and still a soldier – she was on the reality TV show Bake Off. When she finished her army service, she moved to Tel Aviv, where she kept baking custom birthday cakes and started to teach baking classes.In June, a year and a half later, Shpitz reached a new milestone. She moved her business out of her apartment and opened her bakery on Tel Aviv’s Bograshov Street, which in recent years has buzzed with kosher restaurants to cater to the many French immigrants in the area.The sit-down bakery, where customers can also order coffee, gives Shpitz the chance to do some of what she did on Bake Off: branch out beyond birthday cakes to a broad range of pastries and desserts, with a ton of chocolate and plenty of her signature pink.Shpitz said she wants her desserts to be of international caliber and style, and she has traveled the world for inspiration. As such, she serves two categories of desserts at her bakery. There are the Paris-inspired desserts, which she calls “patisserie fancy flavors,” and the more down-to-Earth American ones.I tried some of each kind. On the American side, there were some perfectly soft chocolate chip cookies, with a milk chocolate and white chocolate filling (NIS 15) that will impress any cookie fan. Some of the other American desserts include donuts with pink chocolate and strawberry cream, blondies with while chocolate and Oreos, chocolate cupcakes with buttercream and more.On the Parisian side, there was an impressive array of mousse-based desserts ranging from NIS 30 to 35. The Oreo and Mekupelet mousse had a pleasant cheesecake-like tang to it. A layered dessert with a crunchy base, milk chocolate and white chocolate mousse, covered in chocolate with a strawberry macaron on top was a real show-stopper. And for someone who wants chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate, there is the Ferrero Roche-inspired hard chocolate-covered chocolate mousse stripe, with candied hazelnuts thrown in for some crunch.Shpitz still takes custom birthday cake orders, and she also sells the “Shpitz Week Birthday Box,” which works on the same principle of an advent calendar. Every day of the week leading up to your birthday, you open a window of the box and get a different dessert (price varies by which desserts you choose). The box is pink, of course.Or Shpitz BakeryKosherBograshov St. 3, Tel Aviv, Ph: 050-301-1102Sun-Thurs: 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m., Fri: 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m.
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