dessert – Page 53 – Michael Eats

PB and J Goodness at Bake Code

Published on April 10, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 4910 Yonge Street, North York
Website: http://bakecode.com/

Hey. Do you like croissants? Of course you do, who doesn’t? How about peanut butter and jelly? Again, I’m going to have to assume the answer is yes. Of course you like PB and J. You’re not a crazy person.

Well then, you’ll be pleased to hear that Bake Code has a PB and J croissant, and yeah, it’s good. How could it not be?

It’s not even that the croissant is that great. It’s fine. It’s a bit too dense, and it’s not quite as flaky or as buttery as you’d like; it’s a decent, middle-of-the-road croissant. But then they fill it with an absolutely absurd amount of peanut butter and strawberry jam, and how could that be bad? It can’t be.

The crispy croissant, the crunchy peanuts on top, and the gooey PB and J turn out to be an irresistible combination. It almost feels like cheating — you could put gobs of peanut butter and jelly into pretty much anything, and it’s going to be delicious. But tasty is tasty.

Consistent Excellence at Bang Bang

Published on April 5, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 93a Ossington Avenue, Toronto
Website: http://bangbangicecream.com/

After the cubano disappointment at La Cubana, I wondered: would Bang Bang pull the same thing? It’s been several months since I’ve had their ice cream. Has it gone downhill, too?

Nope. It’s still easily the best ice cream in Toronto, and some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had.

Bang Bang tends to have at least one new flavour in their rotation, and this time it was the Bad Dad Joke, which they describe as having miso pecans and butterscotch.

It was so damn good.

As usual, the ice cream itself was absolutely superlative: rich, creamy, and amazing. The flavour was just as good, with the butterscotch and the toasty nuts being a perfect match. The flavour was a bit more complex than you’d expect — whether that’s the miso or something else, I have no idea, but it was ridiculously good regardless.

It also had these white chunks in there, and I have no idea what they were (meringue, possibly?) but they added a nice crispiness to the ice cream that worked quite well.

Felix & Norton Frozen Cookie Disappointment

Published on March 22, 2018March 22, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

I used to love Felix & Norton. Their Unionville location was in a plaza right across from where I went to high school, so cookies were a regular occurrence. I remember them being some of the best store-bought cookies around: lightly crispy and chewy, with a really great buttery flavour and high-quality chocolate chunks.

So when I saw unbaked Felix & Norton cookies in the freezer section at a local Loblaws, I couldn’t get them in my cart fast enough.

And it’s not a bad deal: nine bucks for a 500 gram bag, which works out to about 20 cookies. I got Menage a Trois, which features cookies with white, milk, and dark chocolate chunks.

Alas, these weren’t the Felix & Norton cookies I remembered. The chunks were more like tiny chocolate fragments, and barely added any chocolate flavour at all. The cookies were just blandly sweet. They were also insanely greasy, and yet had almost zero buttery flavour.

They weren’t the worst things ever, I guess — they were certainly better than something like Chips Ahoy, but they’re not even close to being in the same league as what you can get at the store.

Cheesecake by Heirloom

Published on March 13, 2018October 20, 2019 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Cheesecake is good. You know what’s better? Cheesecake dipped in chocolate and nuts, and covered with chocolate and caramel sauces.

Cheesecake by Heirloom was in the Concept section of Yorkdale (I’m a bit late posting this, and it’s now gone — super useful blog post, I know, but supposedly they’ll be selling cheesecakes again at a different location in April), and it’s pretty great. I mean, how could it not be? They start with a good quality piece of New York style cheesecake, then they cover it in all the aforementioned stuff.

And all that stuff is quite good. It’s incredibly sweet and rich — maybe to a fault. It’s not a subtle dessert. It’s probably not something you’d want to eat all the time, but man, it’s delicious.

Milkshake Disappointment at the Hershey Store

Published on March 10, 2018March 10, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

There’s a Hershey store in Niagara Falls, and I have a pretty vivid memory of the chocolate milkshake there being amazing.

Granted, this was at least a decade ago, but when I recently found myself in Niagara Falls with some time to kill, I got very excited by the prospect of having this milkshake again.

In my memory, this was a superior milkshake with a surprisingly intense chocolaty flavour. I’ve never been a fan of Hershey chocolate, but this milkshake was something else. It was special.

Well, either I’m way wrong about this or it’s gone way downhill, because the milkshake was not good at all. It was throat-burningly sweet, and it didn’t even have much of a chocolaty flavour. It was just all-encompassing sweetness. It was bad.

I got about halfway through, ate the Hershey’s Kiss on top (which tasted like nothing after the mouth-annihilating sweetness of the milkshake), then chucked the rest in the garbage.