Mirabelles Bakery — Fine pastries, pies, cookies and cakes are the hallmarks of this bakery. The croissants are truly French-style; the flourless chocolate cakes, to die for.
Other Finalists (Inside Chittenden County)
- Belleville Bakery
- Boxcar Bakery
- Madeleine's Bakery
- Sweet Simone's
Red Hen Baking Co. — Soon after Red Hen Baking's husband-and-wife co-owners, Randy George and Eliza Cain, moved their bread bakery to Middlesex from its original Duxbury location in 2007, they added pastries. When customers started asking for lunch, George recalled, "I thought, We've got bread. I guess we can put some things on it."
Red Hen's long-fermented breads include airy ciabatta, crisp-crusted baguettes and hearty loaves of Mad River Grain. They are made almost entirely with freshly milled, organic regional grain, 20 percent of which is milled on-site.
The bread is sold throughout Vermont and at New Hampshire's Upper Valley co-op stores. For pastries and sandwiches, head to the bakery, where the daily rotation of sweets might include seasonal strawberry-rhubarb Danish, flaky almond croissants or a nutty buckwheat coconut chocolate chip cookie — which happens to be made without wheat flour.
Sandwiches range from the classic jambon beurre on baguette to a soul-satisfying, grilled mushroom Reuben loaded with sauerkraut and Swiss cheese on Alice's Rye. You won't even consider leaving the crusts.
Other Finalists (Outside Chittenden County)
- Birchgrove Baking
- Bohemian Bakery
- Red House Sweets
- Windy Lane Bakehouse
