Going For Broke At Toronto’s First Bespoke Bakery

Sweet Flour Bake Shop
2352 Bloor Street West
416-763-2253

It’s been close to a decade since I regularly frequented the Bloor West Village and its surrounding enclaves. Sandwiched between The Kingsway and High Park, the combined neighbourhoods were once a preferred stomping ground. While this wide swath of the city is teeming with worthwhile destinations, moving out of the vicinity has meant that I don’t come around as often as I’d like. For whatever reason, (whether intentional or not) being propelled only by public transit or foot generally coerces me to patronize vendors within a 10 block radius of my own home.

Until now.

Spending a recent Sunday morning in the company of the energetic and diminutive Kim Gans (proprietor of Sweet Flour Bake Shop), I’ve found a compelling reason to make a concerted effort to return more often.

Sweet Flour is a first of its kind bespoke cookie bakery. Though while-you-wait custom cookies form the core business model, they fill out their roster by building muffin tops, steel cut oatmeal, granola, and sandwich cookies to customer specifications through the addition of a dizzying array of mix-ins and spread options (29 at last count).

Mere moments after I’ve entered the beguilingly-scented bakery, Gans has whisked me to a corner table to ply me with samples of nearly everything they produce. Like anyone with a strong business acumen in their field, she anticipates my needs before I even have a chance to have them, proffering tea and a cold glass of milk at intervals during our tasting, before I’ve even recognized a desire for either.

After a few minutes, Gans’ background in business and brand management is evident. Though not formally trained in the pastry arts, she works closely with a development firm and head baker to bring her delicious ideas to life. She modestly attributes part of her success to choosing to “surround [her]self with experts in areas that you’re not”. It only takes a few bites to ascertain that her team is worth their weight in gold, as together they’ve developed a line of cookies par excellence.

“I wanted to do something I knew and something I was really passionate about and I love cookies because for me it was always about connecting with someone,” Gans explains when I enquire about her entrepreneurial leap into the bakery business.

Customization of foodstuffs has become a huge trend over the past few years, with build-your-own cereal bars, smoothie shacks, burger and sandwich dens, and soup and salad houses popping up all over town and beyond. In cookies, Gans noticed a niche that wasn’t being served. “The barrier is time,” she admits, because people want what they want and they want it their way, but it’s got to be snappy or else they lose interest.

Her goal became to “deliver the best cookie that tastes great, but only in 2 minutes,” primarily achieved through the use of highly specialized machinery. The high tech ovens that form the backbone of the a la minute business were donated for development purposes by the oven manufacturer. “At the time the manufacturers of these ovens didn’t know how to make a cookie or master a cookie in this machine,” but Gans conspiratorially adds that to make an optimal Sweet Flour cookie, the oven is only “one piece of the whole puzzle”.

The full process is brilliant in its simplicity. Cookie makers take a lump of the chosen dough (original, peanut butter or oatmeal) and smoosh in 2 to 3 desired mix-ins. Once distributed throughout, the cookie gets blasted in the oven for a little under 2 minutes. A quick stopover on a frosty cooling slab, then the fresh creation is ready to eat.

For those who don’t feel like waiting to whip up their own, Sweet Flour also has a lineup of 18 signature cookies baked in-house with 6 flavours rotated daily, and 11 signature muffin tops, of which 2 flavours are available every day.

Brand new on my visit are 2 gluten-free signature cookie options; a decadently dense peanut butter cookie that was so luscious I wouldn’t have known it was GF, and the gold standard classic chocolate chip. Despite the fact that the gluten-free varieties aren’t yet available for customization, something tells me it won’t be long before Gans and her team overcome that hurdle, as they have with everything else.

But people who don't live near Bloor West Village, need not despair; Gans has plans to grow Sweet Flour, hopefully by the middle of next year. She sees the brand eventually expanding across Canada and North America, but intends to keep each store true to working with as many local suppliers as possible to help support the community. She works the counter 20 hours a week, because “you’re in touch with the consumer and there’s so much learning about what we can do better and differently” which is something Gans vows she never wants to lose sight of.

Her true joy, it seems, is being a part of each customer’s happy moment. “I get most of my energy from my customers,” she explains, “I love what people tend to do with personalization; it’s all about what did you get in your cookie and let me share what I got in mine.”

My ideal cookie that day was an oatmeal, dark chocolate, fig and pistachio concoction that was as lovely to behold as it was satisfying to pop in my mouth.  Which is the inherent beauty of a company like Sweet Flour; the only roadblock to making a fantastic cookie are the limits of your own imagination.

Gans put it best when she said, ‘we can make people smile, so that’s kind of our objective”, and I can attest that the goodies at Sweet Flour will make customers do just that. Constantly.

Porsha Perreault is a freelance writer, voracious eater, amateur charcutier, and chocolate enthusiast living in Little Italy. Now that the farmer’s market and gardening season is over, she can often be found with too much time on her hands, or blogging about her obsession with food at Foodie and the Everyman.