Rural Iowa serves up a `Dutch treat'

PELLA, Iowa -- This is the town that pastry built.

Actually it was built by Dutch settlers, and today it is sustained by a famous window-maker, but pastry is what makes Pella different from Prairie Meadows and Prairie City and a hundred other remote crossroads that are sprinkled across rural Iowa like confectioners' sugar.

You can walk into Jaarsma's Bakery and commit a caloric catastrophe by picking out a few doughnuts (glazed, sugared, cinnamon and jelly) or creating an assortment of strudel (cream cheese, apricot-almond, raspberry or blueberry). Just a few doors down,…