sweet – Page 31 – Michael Eats

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.

Nugateau

Published on February 16, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Meh.

Can that be my whole review? Just meh? It’s my blog, so yeah, it can. But fine, I’ll expand on that a little bit.

Nugateau is a fancy eclair place that is (for now, at least) in the Concept section of Yorkdale Mall (they have a permanent location on Queen Street as well).

I tried a pistachio and a salted caramel eclair, and they were both fine, I guess — but if I’m paying six or seven bucks for an eclair the size of a spring roll, I kinda want to be blown away. Nothing about the custardy filling in either of these things particularly stood out in any meaningful way.

Worse, they both tasted like they had been filled way in advance. The pastry was… well, “mushy” might be overstating it, but it had seen better days, that’s for sure.

Momofuku Milk Bar

Published on July 28, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 190 University Avenue, Toronto
Website: http://milkbarstore.com/main/toronto/

When the much-anticipated Momofuku opened its doors in Toronto a few months back, it was missing one key piece (in my sugar-addled, dessert-craving mind at least): the Milk Bar, where they serve up cookies, pastries, and perhaps most famously, Crack Pie.

That omission has finally been rectified, with all kinds of treats available in a walk-in closet-sized space on Momofuku’s second floor (all baked, oddly enough, in New York and shipped here on a daily basis).

What’s Crack Pie? it’s basically a sugar pie, or a butter tart without the raisins, or a pecan pie without the pecans. It’s nothing you haven’t had many times before, which makes its moniker a bit of an over-sell; it’s good, but I’m not going to be rushing out to have another one. It’s not quite as addictive as its name implies (and whether a small slice is worth six dollars is up for debate).

I will be back, however, to try some of their cookies, which are much more reasonably priced at two bucks each.

My favourite thing about the Crack Pie is probably the crust. Though the filling is quite tasty, if a bit overly sweet, the crust is pretty great. It’s dense and buttery, with a thin, crispy layer of caramelized sugar on the outside. It’s probably the closest thing to crack-like addictiveness in this pie.