Beyond Cupcakes, Society Bakery Launches "grandma's Dessert World Tour"

If you never thought of an empanada as a delicious dessert, then Roshi Muns, an energetic 37-year old, award-winning baking entrepreneur, has scored a culinary creative coup. Roshi's Society Bakery will expand its offerings of signature cupcakes and assorted sweets to include empanadas, featuring a variety of fillings from fig, honey and cheese; chocolate, hazelnut, and asadero cheese; dulce de leche and asadero cheese; and an Anglo-Mexican hybrid known as Tex-Mex fusion: Texas Pecan Praline Empanada, among others. The sweet-tasting empanadas, including colorful birthday cake empanadas, are a sample of the innovative new desserts to be introduced in October at Society Bakery's main location, 3426 Greenville Avenue, in Dallas' retro, hip, affluent M Street neighborhood.
Muns has also taken the traditional panna cotta, "cooked cream" in Italian, and reimagined it as marshmallow panna cotta paired with pumpkin mousse and graham cracker crumbs, essentially, pumpkin pie in a modern, stylish cup. The bakery is also debuting panna cotta flavors such as buttermilk panna cotta accented with pomegranate gelee, vanilla panna cotta with honey, and coconut milk panna cotta with chocolate.

Roshi Muns received the attention of the food world two years ago, when she took classic Amish whoopie pies and replaced their usual cream fillings with a rum sauce center and sandwiched them between rich bread pudding, coining the term "bread pudding whoopie pie". The Texas bakery is credited with originating the bread pudding whoopie pie much like Caf� Du Monde in New Orleans takes ownership of the beignet. Another culinary innovation came with the introduction of a peppermint red velvet whoopie pie on Ace of Cakes' Duff Goldman's Food Network show, Sugar High. Muns soon gained recognition for being among the very first new generation of bakers looking to expand and experiment beyond the popular cupcakes appearing in shops around America. She sees herself as a "lover of invention".
Muns continues to sell her popular cupcakes, whoopie pies, lemon squares, brownies, sugar cookies, and chocolate chip cookies, but she wanted to explore classic regional and international dishes as well, and to reinterpret them with cultural fusion ingredients. The result of her constant experimentation has led to provocative and innovative bakery case choices soon to be the talk of Dallas, where Muns is known as the "celebrity baker" for the number of entertainers, event planners and sports figures who have commissioned showcase desserts.
In addition to Muns' constant tinkering with traditional empanadas and panna cotta, her experimentation with queso fresco occurred because of her San Antonio Hispanic grandma's fondness for the cheese, resulting in a unique flavor pairing called the Spanish banana. It is a combination of bananas, rum sauce and queso fresco, and members of the Cooking Channel show, Eat Street, say they have "never seen anything like it."

Muns likes to say her inspiration and broad flavor tastings come from "your grandmother's world tour of desserts". "I found a lot of inspiration by researching dishes served back in our grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' eras", explained Muns. "The tastes may be different but the basic appeal of these dishes has been generational", said the single working mom who grew the business out of her kitchen "from nothing" with her former CFO boss as her first customer ten years ago, to a business with thirty employees and more than million dollars in sales.
Voted one of the "10 Best Cupcakes in America" by The Ellen DeGeneres Show and "Best Cupcakes" and "Best Petit Fours" by Dallas Observer, Society Bakery has two