sweet – Page 25 – Michael Eats

Amazing Cupcakes at Prairie Girl Bakery

Published on May 10, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 150 Bloor Street West, Toronto
Website: https://www.prairiegirlbakery.com/

Prairie Girl Bakery might just serve my favourite cupcakes in the city. There are some other contenders (the Cupcake Shoppe comes to mind), but Prairie Girl is right up there.

I like that they actually have three different sizes — standard, mini, and cutie. The mini size is absolutely perfect if you’ve just had a big meal and you want something sweet that isn’t going to make you feel completely sick. It’s still a couple of decent bites’ worth of cupcake, so it’s enough to satisfy, but not so much to make you question the way you’re living your life.

On this particular visit I got the banana peanut butter, which features peanut butter frosting with banana cake. Not surprisingly, it was great — the cake basically tasted like a lighter, fluffier banana bread. It had a really distinct banana flavour that worked perfectly with the very creamy peanut butter frosting.

The whole thing was sweet, but with enough of a balance to not be a complete sugar overload. It’s good stuff.

McFlurry Deliciousness at McDonald’s

Published on May 5, 2018May 5, 2018 by Michael Nusair2 Comments

Location: 6170 Bathurst Street, Toronto
Website: https://www.mcdonalds.ca/

Generally speaking, I think McFlurries are a waste of time. I mean, they’re just a poor man’s Blizzard, right? If I’m craving a blended ice cream treat, why get an imitation when I can have the original?

It turns out I might be wrong about this, because I just had the Butterscotch Blondie McFlurry, and it was easily better than any Blizzard I’ve had in recent memory.

It had a really rich caramel flavour from the abundant butterscotch, and the sizable blondie chunks were chewy, tasty, and satisfying. It’s super sweet, obviously, but there was enough going on here that it didn’t feel one-note.

The ice cream was a little too melty, but aside from that? Shockingly good.

Delicious Cupcakes and Cookies at Short and Sweet Bakeshop

Published on April 14, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 111 Richmond Street West, Toronto (in the Assembly Chef’s Hall)
Website: http://shortandsweetcupcakes.ca/

Are you a cake person or a frosting person? Because the cupcake I had at Short and Sweet is making me doubt myself. Generally I prefer a cupcake that’s a bit heavier on the cake in the cake-to-frosting ratio, but Short and Sweet goes hard in the other direction. And yet I quite enjoyed it.

As you can see from the photo of its midsection, between the injected sauce and the icing on top, it’s something like 35 percent cake, and 65 percent sauce and frosting. It’s pretty intense.

I got the Dream Team cupcake, which is a vanilla cupcake that’s been topped with vanilla buttercream and a swirl of caramel and chocolate sauces. It’s also injected with the aforementioned sauces. It’s an intense, in-your-face sugar bomb — and yet it somehow isn’t too sweet. All of the flavours go together so well.

It helps that all of the individual components are great — the cake is moist and fluffy, the buttercream is smooth and velvety, and the two sauces are great. In particular, the rich, dulce-de-leche-esque caramel sauce is absolutely fantastic. But everything is so sweet, and altogether you’d think it would be way too sweet, but it isn’t. It works.

I also tried the s’mores cookie sandwich, which consists of two above-average chocolate chip cookies encasing a whole bunch of chocolate frosting and marshmallow sauce.

Do I even need to say anything else? Or does it go without saying that it was delicious? Because it’s just as good as you’d hope it would be.

I should note that it’s incredibly heavy, both figuratively and literally — the thing must weigh like half a pound, so eating this all at once isn’t advisable unless you have a particularly large appetite. But it’s so, so good.

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.