Cupcakes are for kids. Indeed, mini cakes with colourful frosting dance in our happiest childhood memories, where we recall this bake sale or that birthday party, a walk down memory lane only complete with a debate on what icing was best.

But today is a new age: Cupcakes were for kids. Now they are something else, the new raison d’etre for charm, sophistication and nostalgia all at once. A short decade ago it would have been damning to have both a cupcake and a driver’s license; now the pastries are delicious conversation starters, geared toward the kid in all of us. Retro is in, and it’s cool to be young again.

They’ve grown up with us, though; they had to. After all, adults still pride themselves on their mature sensibilities. So if there is any mystery as to how cupcakes became a sensation overnight, their success is crystal clear. We have no shortage of specialty cupcake shops, or their new availability in big box grocery stores; bakeries offer them, and brides request them. But where most present the basic cake, frosting and perhaps cute decorative topper, Eini & Co. has taken the process a step further, and created The Luxury Cupcake.

Continue reading The Luxury Cupcake »

Yummy Stuff
1660 Queen Street West
416-531-9732

All of the ladies who work at my vet’s office have been waiting with bated breath for the grand opening of the Yummy Stuff retail shop. For the past six weeks or so, while owner Morag Cleevely has been using the storefront as a industrial kitchen space in which to fill custom orders, the wafting scent of baking cookies and cakes has been travelling the three doors east past their office, taunting them with visions of frosting and pastry as they take their canine charges for a walk, yet leaving them frustrated and unfilled. While many neighbourhoods are becoming jaded by their selection of fancy treats, the folks here in Parkdale are excited by the prospect of our first real fancy bakeshop in, well, decades.

Continue reading Parkdale’s Got the Yummy Stuff »

The raw food diet isn’t yet very wide spread in Toronto. There are only a handful of restaurants and chefs here catering to this diet/philosophy. But the appeal of this seemingly restrictive way of eating may increase with the infusion of gourmet raw cuisine into the city’s dining scene, particularly at the sweet end of the spectrum.

Raw food culinary artist Jessica Acs is hoping that the appeal of flavour and excitement will lead folks to try a healthy alternative to traditional cooking.

Continue reading The Sweet Raw Truth »