The Ring Ding Bar in New York City serves rounds of sweet memories.
And there’s no ID required.
The Ring Ding Bar is a whimsical Big Apple sugar shop where ebullient baker Madeline (Carvalho) Lanciani dishes a delicious dedication to her American childhood, while saluting her immigrant family’s success story.
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It’s a sweet spot with a rustic small-town vibe, wedged into an old brick warehouse in the city.
“You can go to a sushi bar and get lots of different sushi,” Lanciani told Fox News Digital, referencing the unique name for her Ring Ding Bar.
“You go to a salad bar, you can have any kind of salad,” Lanciani said. “You can come to the Ring Ding Bar and get a lot of different Ring Dings.”
The baker, dubbed a “genius” by one customer, deflected the praise. She referred to herself instead as a “little creative witchcraftery person.”
With painstaking care and an artist’s flair, Lanciani conjures up new spells for supermarket-snack Ring Dings. Her mixing-bowl hocus-pocus reveals a Crayon-box kaleidoscope of colors and flavors.
Original Ring Dings are circular chocolate devil’s food cakes filled with vanilla cream and coated in chocolate icing. Still sold in markets and convenience stores today, they enjoyed widespread popularity when Lanciani was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.
She offers classic white cream-in-chocolate Ring Dings for traditionalists, next to a rainbow splash of wonder.
Red velvet Ring Dings pack vanilla cream between layers of bright ruby cake surrounded by a red chocolate shell.
Wrapped in pink chocolate, the strawberry shortcake Ring Dings have layers of red fruit and white cream between vanilla cake.
Apricot Ring Dings, one of Lanciani’s latest creations, displays monochrome layers of sunny yellow – cake, cream and coating – inside and out.
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She offers nearly 30 different Ring Dings, available at her bakery in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, or by mail order.
She’s about to launch what she calls “After Hours” at the Ring Ding Bar. The bakery will serve its Ring Dings, plus other retro-American desserts “you can’t get anywhere else,” she said, plus wine and other drinks from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
“I make riffs on things that were important to me and that I loved as a kid,” Lanciani said.
“And when I was a little girl my mother made everything, so we usually didn’t have store-bought treats. But I remembered that when we got A’s on our report cards, she would put a Ring Ding in our lunch boxes.”
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Ring Dings also represented her family’s adopted homeland, a symbol of America’s burgeoning post-war consumer culture and prosperous homefront that the baker’s father fought for soon after arriving from the Old World.
Her parents, Joseph and Maxine (Moura) Carvalho, were both immigrants from Portugal. Her mother arrived in the late 1920s, her father in the mid-1930s.
Joe Carvalho earned his red, white and blue stripes as a U.S. Army Air Force navigator aboard B-17 bombers in World War II.
His warplane was shot down over Europe. Carvalho spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp.
Lanciani remains proud of her late father’s service to the family’s adopted homeland, she said.
“Everything I make has to resonate with me personally,” she said.
“And, you know, as a child I thought it was like the cat’s meow to have Ring Dings in your life,” she continued. “They just gave me good feelings and good vibes. So I started making them.”
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Lanciani opened the Ring Ding Bar in 2015 under the umbrella of her Duane Park Pâtisserie. She feared the arrival of a cease-and-desist order from the maker and trademark holder of Ring Dings, now McKee Foods of Kingman, Arizona.
Instead, she received their adoration.
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“A cute side story,” she said.
“About six or seven years ago, when the CEO of McKee retired, they asked me to send Ring Dings to his retirement party. I was like, ‘Holy bleep!’ I guess I got their stamp of approval.”
