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All stories relating to desserts

Recipe to Riches reviewed: Episode 6, Kulfi Karma

Six episodes deep, it seems like the producers have finally started to give host Jesse Palmer a little more rope. This week, the Bachelor star and ex–football star finally got to show a little heart after the first elimination, exclaiming, “That was a little bit intense, wasn’t it?” before noting, philosophically, “And then there were only two.” The criticism that keeps coming back about this show, in our comments and elsewhere, is that every episode is the same as the last. Perhaps this was an attempt to mix things up a bit. Still, the comments might have applied a little better to last week’s tear-stained episode than to this week’s frozen treats challenge, which was mercifully more even-keeled. After the jump, our regular recap and tasting panel.

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The Informer

A Message from Toronto Life

August 28, 2011 | 1:25 pm

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Jack Layton, fall fashion and more: the top stories from the St. Joseph Media digital network

We bring you highlights from around the St. Joseph Media network in our new weekend feature.

• Thanks Jack, We’ve Got It From Here [Torontoist]
• Jack Layton: the author [Quill and Quire]
• Fall 2011 trend report: 83 of the best bets in coast, dresses, shoes, bag and more! [Fashion Magazine]
• 15 Fabulous Back-to-School Freebies and Deals [Canadian Family]
• 5 Coffee Desserts [20 Minute Supper Club]
• SHOP TALK: The man purse (or, how big is your bag?) [Ottawa Magazine]
• Interview With Travelflix Blogger Timothy Chan [Where]
• Wedding Cakes for Every Season [Wedding Bells]

The Hype

From the Print Edition

August 5, 2011 | 9:00 am

1 Comment

Best of the City 2011: Seven ways to have a great time (bowling and bachelor parties included)

(Image: Liam Mogan)

Ten-pin Queue Spot for a bachelor party Spot for a bridal party Yacht rental Saltwater dip Exercise craze

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The Dish

Opening

April 28, 2011 | 3:43 pm

14 Comments

Introducing: Petite and Sweet, a new Summerhill sweet shop and event planning boutique

Sweets counter at Petite and Sweet

What do you get when you put two high-end event planners and a cake decorator together? Petite and Sweet, a new Summerhill boutique specializing in luxe events, with a shop that showcases all their offerings, like specialty desserts, confectionery, flowers, gifts and special occasion accessories. Petite and Sweet is the spawn of two companies: Madison Eight Event Laboratories, corporate event planners, and SweetFix, which provides dessert tables for events, parties, and business meetings. At the centre of both companies is Elle Daftarian, who brought together her business partners, Casper Hydar of Madison Eight and Yolanda Gampp of SweetFix, to create the new store.

In the shop, customers can get a taste of what both constituent companies have to offer. Taking notes from Ladurée in Paris and Chanel’s white-with-black-trim motif, the boutique has a light, contemporary touch. Giant flower arrangements, crystal chandeliers, decorated tiered cakes and two white-buttoned winged chairs line the store. Special event staples like cake stands, silk flower arrangements, cookbooks, ornamental pieces, gift-wrapping and invites are also on display.

At the front of the shop is a contemporary version of a candy shop offering chocolate bars (wrapped in beautiful handmade Japanese paper), gumballs, specialty M+M’s and more. At the back you’ll find “fancy Oreos” ($2.95), dipped marshmallows ($2.75), French macarons ($2.75) and cupcakes ($3.25), as well as croissants and cookies. Italian Hausbrandt coffee and French Fauchon tea are offered, and an outdoor patio is on the way.

: Outside the store

: The candy and gumball station

: Sweets counter at Petite and Sweet

: Fauchon Tea

: Cupcakes

: Croissants

: Petite and Sweet milk chocolate bars wrapped in handmade Japanese paper

: Custom designed white chocolate–dipped “Fancy Oreos”

: Macarons

: Homemade marshmallow

Petite & Sweet, 420 Summerhill Ave., 647-348-7700, petiteandsweet.ca.

The Dish

Opening

April 11, 2011 | 3:10 pm

9 Comments

Coco Rogue to bring stylish chocolates and desserts to Yonge and Eglinton

Yonge and Eglinton is a neighbourhood that loves its cafés and bakeries (witness the Cupcake Shoppe, La Bohème, the Designer Cookie Boutique and Bakeshop, Dufflet, La Bamboche and Jedd’s Frozen Custard). So it’s no surprise that the ’hood is about to be home to Coco Rogue, an haute chocolate and dessert shop with decor to match (think chandeliers and a grand piano).

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The Dish

Restauran-TO

March 9, 2011 | 4:26 pm

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Canadian chefs: local food is still the new black

Bite-sized desserts were one of the few fun trends in this year’s survey (Image: Eliyas J)

The results from the 2011 Canadian Chef Survey were announced Monday at the fourth annual Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association show. More than 500 chefs confirmed what locavores and the 400-plus attendees at last week’s Terroir Symposium knew all along: locally produced food and locally inspired dishes are hot. Less surprising still was the focus on sustainable practices and nutritionally driven plates. While the list hardly qualifies as revolutionary, it is interesting to compare this year’s results to the up-and-coming trends predicted one year ago. So how close was it?

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

February 14, 2011 | 3:18 pm

2 Comments

Just Desserts: sophisticated sweet wines worth the splurge

By David Lawrason

(Illustration: Jack Dylan)

Sweet wines generally get a bad rap. Even avid wine lovers tend to dismiss them as overly expensive, cloying or lacking in refinement. Yet the only wine I ever awarded a perfect 100-point score was a sweet Château d’Yquem 2001 Sauternes from Bordeaux. It was profound, powerful and exquisite. At a tasting of sweet wines—from Mediterranean muscats to Canadian icewines to Australian “stickies”—the quality of almost everything I tried was astounding. Most types are made from grapes that have lingered on the vine until they’re slightly raisiny, resulting in high sugar content, concentrated flavours and low juice volume (the same goes for frozen grapes pressed for icewines). In some cases, the wines are then aged in barrels for anywhere from three months to 40 years. The labour-intensive process accounts for the famously high price of sweet wine. But they aren’t always expensive, and the value is generally excellent, with each bottle presenting a range of flavours as complex as any pastry chef can conjure up. They make a terrific dinner party gift, paired with rich cheeses (port and blue is a no‑brainer), or sipped solo instead of dessert. Here, 10 great sweeties at the LCBO.

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The Dish

De-licious

December 21, 2010 | 1:51 pm

23 Comments

12 best bets for Winterlicious 2011: our chief critic goes through the menus so you don’t have to

A steak dinner at Noce (Image: Renée Suen)

Big-spending downtown Torontonians have taken in the past few years to whining about Winterlicious, but the two-week dining festival, running from January 28 through February 10, remains popular for a reason: it offers great value, particularly if you choose your reservations well. Here are a dozen of Toronto Life’s best bets. They’re older, more established places, generally, with kitchens that clearly care. And though we haven’t yet tasted the restaurants’ 2011 Winterlicious menus, they’re full of interesting, delicious-sounding picks.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

December 10, 2010 | 9:18 am

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Sweet Relief: Anne Yarymowich’s maple-apple-caramel concoction

Anne Yarymowich’s maple-apple-caramel concoction takes the cake

(Photograph: Edward Pond; Illustration by Jack Dylan)

“At Frank, when we send a dish out from the kitchen, I want it to elicit ‘mmms’ rather than ‘wows’—I want it to be comforting, not complicated. Our pouding chômeur, which loosely translates as ‘poor man’s pudding,’ is the perfect example. It’s a French-Canadian dessert that dates from a time when maple syrup was cheaper than sugar. I first tasted it when one of our banquet managers, who’s from Gatineau, brought it to a staff potluck; I knew right then it had to go on the menu. We developed a few different versions, but the best was a sort of hybrid of pouding chômeur and tarte tatin. It’s a beautiful marriage.”

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

September 3, 2010 | 8:43 am

2 Comments

Just Opened: we review three of the city’s new restaurants

Religious burgers, heavenly house-made bread and a world-class oenophile

(Image: Ryan Szulc)

THE BURGER’S PRIEST
1636 Queen St. E., 647-346-0617

The battle for the city’s best burger just got more heated. The loosely packed, hand-formed, cooked-to-medium patties at this tiny Catholic-kitsch place have a legitimate claim. They’re gloriously simple: Alberta beef that’s ground in-house a few times a day, plus exquisitely insubstantial buns that can be accessorized in any of the old-school ways. (If you want caramelized passion fruit, you’d best look at a heathen establishment.) The Option, made from two roasted portobello caps sandwiching a mix of cheeses, rolled in panko and deep-fried, is the city’s first joyful veggie burger. The Pope is a double cheeseburger, plus The Option, all on a single bun. (It’s also a death wish, in case you were wondering.) As for the name, the proprietor, a former seminary student, claims to be “redeeming the burger one customer at a time.” He’s even installed confessional privacy screens in place of sneeze guards. Cheesy, yes. But that’s the point. Unlicensed. Cash only. Closed Sunday.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

August 30, 2010 | 2:21 pm

7 Comments

Full Throttle: Chris Nuttall-Smith takes on Parts and Labour

The Parkdale it spot is a raucous hybrid of fine dining and indie cheek. It’s loud, stylish and double-dares you to eat fried pig face By Chris Nuttall-Smith

(Image: Ryan Szulc)

They started jacking the stereo around 8 p.m., just as we were eating the chopped raw lamb with herbed, salted lard. By the time the horse tenderloin arrived, it felt as if a maniacal toddler had been handed control of the dial. Groups of young, aggressively stylish women tottered in, past the velvet rope, past the bouncer with the neck tattoo and under the decorative, gold-leafed satellite dish that its designer (one of the restaurant’s owners) described as a “Hegelian dialectic between high and low.” The music, thumping from the five JBL speakers arrayed above the bar, kept rising, as if in salutation. We had to press our ribs into the edge of our long, too-wide communal table and shout to hear each other when we bothered trying to talk at all.

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The Hype

To-Do List

August 18, 2010 | 12:45 pm

2 Comments

The Weekender: Justin Bieber’s concert, the Ex and six other events on our to-do list

Two ways to make tweens dizzy: the Ex and Bieber

1. JUSTIN BIEBER
Where the Biebs goes, hordes of screaming preteens are sure to follow. If escorting a few of those girls is on the agenda, Godspeed. If it counts for anything, Bieber did get Kanye West’s seal of approval over Twitter last weekend; West apparently loves Bieber’s latest single, “Runaway Love.” Aug. 21. $66.35. Air Canada Centre, 50 Bay St., 416-870-8000, ticketmaster.ca.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

August 4, 2010 | 12:21 pm

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Best of the City: our guide to everything exemplary in Toronto in 2010

We’ve become a city obsessed with provenance. We know the politics of the farmer who collects our eggs, whether our T-shirt designer plays in an indie band, and which Japanese artisan hand-carved our kid’s non-toxic forks. We gossip about the people behind our stuff like they’re celebrities because notable origins almost always mean a superior product—and loonies well spent. This year, our crew of expert consumers dug deep, bravely comparing the gleam of cufflinks, road-testing fixed-gear bikes, sniffing perfumes, measuring poolboys’ biceps, and sampling an entire summer’s worth of steak, ice cream, fresh-squeezed lemonade and more. Here is our guide to everything exemplary in Toronto in 2010

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

August 4, 2010 | 12:19 pm

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Best of the City 2010: four ways that humble ice cream is made magnificent

Banana Split
Oddfellows
936 Queen St. W., 416-534-5244

Diners at the chic communal table struggle bravely to retain an air of ironic detachment in the face of three scoops of rich, smooth house-made ice cream—chocolate, vanilla and strawberry—sprinkled with berries and toasted nuts and perched atop halved bananas and a chewy brownie. $12.

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The Dish

Weekly Lunch Pick

June 28, 2010 | 8:35 am

2 Comments

Where to eat lunch this week: Red Tea Box

Have your cake—and bento box, too—at the city’s most charming tea house

The place: The vibrant cakes on display in the Red Tea Box’s Queen West storefront window only hint at the wonderful setting beyond: mismatched furniture set up in a hidden coach house and on the whimsical back patio. The latter, with its Asian decor and shady pear tree, makes a resplendent setting for a summer lunch.

The crowd: Most tables are full and occupied by women enjoying a break from work or Queen West shopping.

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