Chic Delights: Holiday Sweets

The Christmas Season is not just for decorating our homes and shopping but also a season for feasting. Last weekend, I joined a Holiday Sweets Tour organised by the Tasty Tours here in our own City of Toronto. The tour is a walking tour around Kensington Market right beside Chinatown in Downtown Toronto. To be honest, I have lived in Toronto for so many years but I have never been to Kensington Market. So when I read in our newspaper, Toronto Star, about some Food Tours around our City, I immediately joined Tasty Tours which luckily had a tour of Holiday Sweets during this month of December.

Tasty Tour was founded and organised by Audrey. This is her business where she leads a group of people during the weekend for a walking tour of sweet treats. Tasty Tours offers two different tours, the Kensington Market Tour and the Chocolate Tour. Our group met Audrey at Ding Dong's Bakery right on Spadina Avenue's Chinatown. Right away, Audrey gave us a brief history of Chinatown and the many different Chinese cuisines in the area. After some introductions, we had some Egg Tarts in the Bakery and some time to shop for some Chinese pastries and buns. All of Audrey's tours involves tasting in every food establishment we visited and of course shopping too. One of the things I enjoyed besides the eating and shopping together, was that we had the chance to meet the owners of the Food Establishments we visited, and they gave us some introduction to themselves and their business. Audrey was very knowledgeable about the history of the area, the market and also about the sweets that we tried. We learnt so many things about sweets that day and also about this part of our City. We all enjoyed it and ended the day so full from Holiday sweets and knowledge about this part of Toronto.

I learnt during this tour that Kensington Market is not your typical market. It is actually a huge market that is composed of diverse community here in Toronto. It encompasses several blocks of streets near Chinatown in Toronto's West side. Every street that we turned was full of Food establishments from Bakeries, Restaurants and other Food Specialities. One thing that also surprised me, was that the prices here are so low compared to other areas in the City. Audrey explained that this is due to the large competition within this area alone. That the producers and businesses produce and sell according to volume.

We visited Cora's Kitchen where we were treated to some Gingerbread cookies.

For the Chocolate Lovers...

These are freshly made truffles in many different flavours. When we arrived we were treated to freshly made Hot Chocolate and also a tasting of the truffles of our own choice. Which one did I try? I tried the Candy Cane. I'm in the Christmas Spirit! Which one will you try?

Candy Cane and Egg Nog are special Christmas truffles.

Akram's Shoppe/ Middle Eastern Sweets

We met the owner of this Middle Eastern Bakery who was so sweet. She explained to us that she is Syrian and her husband is Lebanese. The bakery, Akram, means "most generous" in the Arabic language, was named after her husband. This bakery is definitely generous in all of these nuts above and sweets from the Middle East, Turkey and even Greece. She also mentioned that the beauty of Toronto is that the city "Welcomed us and the community here call me and my husband, Mom and Dad."

See the prices above. The Food around Kensington Market and Chinatown are mostly priced at $1 each, 3 Egg tarts for $1. Unbelievable! Truly a food shopping haven!

The sweets here are Middle Eastern, some Turkish Delight and Greek Baklava. She made us try some Middle Eastern cookie that has sesame seeds with Dates, powdered Almond cookies with pistachio and another cookie with mixed nuts. They were all delicious! I bought some to bring home.

Pancho's Bakery/Latin American

This is a sweet that have childhood memories for me, Churros, which is originally from Spain. When we were young, my mother would serve churros and hot chocolate for our snack. Then when we visit Spain, we never miss eating churros and Spanish Hot Chocolate. Try them when you visit Spain.

But this Churros is quite different because this bakery is actually Mexican. There is a whole in the middle where they fill it with your own choice of Caramel, Strawberry or Chocolate. Nothing beats the taste of a hot churros with some chocolate. After eating the Churros, I was already so full! I hope you are not that full yet?

Blue Banana is a new concept store where it is composed of over 200 Merchants but you do not see them in there. The store looks like a normal store but there are booths within each section selling different products.