A delight for families visiting San Francisco in the Christmas season – throughout the city, shops and bakeries are filled with fun holiday treats.
Here’s some favorite shops in different neighborhoods – Ferry Building, Japantown, North Beach and Ghirardelli Square.
Ferry Building – Embarcadero
On the Embarcadero, at the Ferry Building Saturday farmers market, be sure to stop into Batter Bakery for hand-decorated shortbread cookies in different shapes – red sweater, candy cane, wreath, snowflake, mitten, tree, penguin, reindeer. Also available gingerbread people, sand angel cookies, snowballs and more.
Inside the Ferry Building, Miette is sweet central – chocolate Santas, gingerbread people, large selection of hard and soft candies, S’More kits, and gingersnap, graham cracker, chocolate chip cookies, .
The Epicurian Trader has sugarfina candies, flavors such as merry berry, gummy bears, mistletoe kisses, a Candy Land candy board game, plus large selection of chocolates.
Japantown
A “must try” is mochi donuts at Mochill in Japan Center!
It’s hard to choose from selection of fun flavors – cinnamon sugar, salted caramel reindeer, blue snowflake, cookies n’ cream, matcha Xmas tree, fruity pebbles, milk tea snowman, berry Barbie tree, and more!
North Beach
North Beach is the historic Italian neighborhood of San Francisco.
We stopped into three different stores to shop for Christmas sweets – Molinari’s Delicatessen, Victoria Pastry and Stella Pastry.
Molinari’s has Christmas sweets, such as panettone, lemon, raspberry and mint hard candies, nougat, and chocolates. This trip we found something new for us – “pandoro,” a Christmas bread from Verona.
Pandoro is similar to panettone (both mean “golden bread” in Italian), but pandoro is baked in a star-shaped pan, cake slices are stars. The cake is dusted with powdered sugar- according to legend, pandoro shape is like snow-covered mountains of northern Italy.
From Victoria and Stella Pastry shops we bought baci di dama (vanilla and chocolate) cookies, pine nut cookies, powdered almond cookies, apricot and raspberry butter cookies.
Ghirardelli Square – Fisherman’s Wharf
Ghirardelli chocolates is another San Francisco tradition. In 1849 Domenico Ghirardelli set up a chocolate business and “confectionary” store in the city, later he opened up an ice cream parlor too.
Each Christmas, Ghirardelli has new flavors – this year look for peppermint bark, white chocolate sugar cookie, dark chocolate peppermint bark, peppermint hot cocoa, and gingerbread cookie chocolates, also caramel chocolate snowmen.
At Ghirardelli Square on Fisherman’s Wharf, in the Original Ghirardelli Ice Cream & Chocolate Shop, stock up on chocolates galore – pick the flavors you like.
Also enjoy hot fudge sundaes, milkshakes, cookies, brownies, and kids will have fun watching a flowing chocolate wall and rollers of chocolate swirling round and round.
