But rooms are cozy, the dogs are friendly, and Craig puts together a homemade, never-the-same-twice breakfast, from soufflés with white Cheddar to a pumpkin and cream cheese kringle (a filled pastry of Scandinavian origin).
For the kringle, pour the milk into a bowl, add the yeast and stir to dissolve.
The delicacy of kringle, achieved by folding and refolding the pastry, partly by machine and partly by hand, and passing it again and again through steel rollers like those on a pasta machine, is what sets it apart.
A golden kringle sign hangs out front, the ancient guild symbol representing a traditional Danish pastry, stippled with fruit and nuts and shaped like a pretzel.
You'll crave Indiana mint candy, Wisconsin kringle, two distinct kinds of Southern barbecue and something called buttermilk pie.
Right there next to it is Ted Drewes frozen custard, dispensed from a tiny stand on old Route 66 in St . Louis and the kringle made in Racine, Wis., by bakeries like O&H, which is the only Danish pastry in America that any self-respecting Dane would eat, and the loaf-sized cinnamon roll adored by the customers of the Machine Shed in Urbandale, Iowa, near Des Moines, me included.
Popular bakery with delicious pastries from the old country, including kringle ($8.95 per cake) and kransekage ($1.75 a piece).
Kris Kringle, owner of snowbiz.org, a Santa-watching web site, believes that Santa's decision to bring in outside managers also reflects the failure of his past attempts at diversification using in-house elves and Lapps.
Significant among these were the pagan Knecht Ruprecht and the Roman figure of Befana, as well as the Christ Child (Christkind, or Kris Kringle).
He acted in few films later in his career, but had notable success as an eccentric developer in Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel, and as a twinkly Kris Kringle in The Miracle of 34th Street.
Also, I must have confused the scene with the one in "Miracle on 34th Street" in which Edmund Gwynne's harmless old Kris Kringle escapes commitment to the nuthouse when the Post Office interrupts his sanity hearing by delivering him twenty-one bags of mail addressed to "Santa Claus".
