Laura, my darling wife, is nuts for French bakeries. Some people, they arrive in a new town and they concern themselves with connecting utilities, finding the local grocery store and coffee shop. Others make sure they know where all the bars are, where to find Thai food at three in the morning and the number of the most reasonable bail bondsman in town.Laura finds the bakeries. All of them, first thing. Even before we knew for sure whether or not we were going to be coming to Seattle, she’d already dug up a half-dozen names, found directions, committed to memory their menus and the brief bios of their staff. She takes this shit seriously, and if, someday, we get the chance to take our act on the road–doing the gig in Vientiane, Macao, the Leeward Isles or Mars–all I’ll have to tell her is that our new apartment is right next door to a French bakery that was just named one of the 10 best in the world and she’ll race me up the boarding ramp and onto the plane.As for me, I’m not so nutso for the pastry as she is. I like a good croissant as much as the next guy, enjoy the occasional tart or mille feuille. And breads I can appreciate with the passion of a true devotee. But while her love of the stuff is deep and soulful and tinged with a bright, sharp edge of fanaticism, there is something about the patissiere’s art that has always left me somewhat cold–some open degree of distance and alien flavor that I have never been able to close. Which is strange, because for someone with a wicked sweet tooth (and mine is just about the wickedest), Frog pastry is usually close to manna. Almond paste I can get behind. Bittersweet chocolate for breakfast? I’m cool with that. But lemon curd, French meringue, custard and raspberry jam and that sickly-sweet glaze that shines the strawberries becomes, after a bite or two, just too much for me.Thus, I have developed a method for judging the relative excellence of the product from the various bakeries around town that I am always coming home to. It goes like this: Laura will go out, buy some crazy amount of tarts and bread and croissant and pain-au-such-and-such. She will call me, tell me the life story of the baker involved, the best hours to pick up bread, about how the shop smelled how this time she really has found the best citron tart in the world. Then I will come home, take one bite of everything, eat all the plain croissant, and leave the rest of it behind until the middle of the night when I suddenly find myself hungry, desperate for sugar and without anywhere to go to get my fix but my own pantry.At this point, I will be faced with a choice: the bag of pastry left over from the day’s excursion or the box of Entenmann’s glazed donuts that are always on my counter. I could live quite happily for a very long time on nothing but sushi and Entenmann’s donuts. Without both of those things available to me, I would not live long at all.I will try the pastry first. One bite, no more. Then I will consider the box. If I give up and eat a donut, the pastry (whatever it is) has not sufficiently moved me to make me change my midnight routine. But if I go back for more pastry? Well, then… That means it truly is something special.Last night, I found myself once again facing the dilemma. Laura had been to Bakery Nouveau (4747 California Ave SW) in the West Seattle Junction earlier that day, had picked up a little bit of everything from this shop, run by 20-year veterans William and Heather Leaman. William was captain of the US bread bakers team in 2005 and won the World Cup of Baking that year. The shop has a reputation of being one of Seattle’s best. She was thrilled.Me, not so much. Granted, the croissant were excellent–best I’ve had since finding this strange little high-altitude bakery way up in the mountains in Colorado–but they were already gone. What remained was the sweet stuff: pain au chocolate, chocolate and almond croissant, cookies glazed in dark chocolate and a slab of pumpkin bread with a not-entirely-unpleasant autumn smell as pungent and pervasive as the odor of lillies at a funeral.On the other side, my beloved Entenmann’s, looking all sugary-sweet, shiny and delicious.The cookie was just a cookie, the pumpkin bread heavy, dense and damp, heavily spiced, bleeding butter and sugar like it’d been stabbed, but overpowering. It was like a whole pumpkin pie, condensed down into a single slice of cake. One bite was more than enough. The pain au chocolate was crisp, flaky, cored with veins of dark chocolate and rich with butter, but needed a warm cup of cafe au lait, a fondly remembered love affair, a view of the Eiffel Tower and the scent of Gauloises cigarettes carried on the cold morning air to make it work for me. And I was ready to give up and reach for the donuts when I came across the twice-baked almond croissant that is one of the specialties at Nouveau. It was interesting, managing to somehow be both crisp and flaky and chewy and soft all at the same time, filled with an almond paste that was restrained enough so as to not taste like eating liquid candy and topped with a gentle fall of powdered sugar. I took a second bite, cracking the stiff skin of it and feeling the smooth savor of all that butter mixing with all that sugar, balanced so gently by the comforting softness of the dough. Then a third.They were amazing, those little almondy bastards. I loved ’em. And happily took the remains of one (and a whole other to keep it company) back to my couch and my Futurama reruns.The good thing about Entenmann’s donuts? They’re almost as indestructible as Twinkies, with a shelf-life like uranium. I knew they’d still be there for me tomorrow, and Laura would be happy to wake to fresh(ish) pain au chocolate and pumpkin bread only slightly nibbled in the night.