February 17, 2026 may be just a regular Tuesday for many, but at Harner’s Bakery and Restaurant in North Aurora it’s a day of delicious, wonderful, paczki-filled organized chaos as the bakery celebrates Fat Tuesday!
Village of North Aurora administration staff had the opportunity to go behind the scenes with Harner’s co-owner Jodi Binkley to get all the details on this once-a-year event and all the effort that goes into putting over 24,000 (yes, you read that right) paczki into the world!
For a little bit of history, Harner’s opened its first location in Aurora in 1960 and its North Aurora Location at 10 West State Street in 1993. Binkley said Harner’s first started making paczki (pronounced “ponch-key”) in about 1994 when her dad, Darryl Harner, got the idea after seeing bakeries in Chicago selling them. “He researched the background and recipes and thought, ‘we could do this,’” Binkley said. That first year debuted four flavors: raspberry, apple, chocolate cream and blueberry with one pan (24-count) of each…