Butter Avenue

Bakery: Butter Avenue
Address: 477 Queen St W, Toronto ON (1 more location)
Website: https://www.butteravenue.com/
Style: French
Price: $$$

Truth be told, I recently walked into Butter Avenue's Yonge and Lawrence location and rather reluctantly walked out. I wasn't in the mood for macarons and was a little overwhelmed by the prices and lack of variety; fond of buttery baked goods and particularly that of the French kind, I learned the 'butter' in the name was not as far-reaching as I had hoped. When, however, a Cake Tour contact went downtown and returned with baked treats from, among other places, Butter Avenue, I wasn't complaining, especially as I hadn't paid for it~ ;)

Butter Avenue is what could be considered a new style of patisserie: a modern, minimalist pastry shop with, essentially, a few higher end items and very limited selection. In addition to countless flavours of macarons, with intriguing flavours such as earl grey, matcha or Tieguanyin tea (yes, plenty of excitement for tea fans!), they sell a couple varieties of elaborate individual or larger tortes: moussey creations decorated with mini macarons or coated in chocolate.

Exhibit A: (Tremblement de) terre et neige

I had the chance to try the matcha cake ($7.95), which is definitely the one I would have opted for: a layered creation of cream, matcha cream, and chocolate dough dusted in a hearty coating of green tea powder and topped with a miniature macaron and sign which should have been resting on the side of the pool of matcha "sauce" and not in it. :/ The taste was really good: an intense pow of flavour from the various forms of green tea powder, the fantastic texture of the cream and a nice compliment to the chocolate dough, though the highlight was probably the macaron coated in sauce. That was so good. ^^

Exhibit B: Reconstruction

 Seeing a) how much thought was put into designing the package, and b) the prices, I questioned why they didn't have boxes for single items. For how much you pay, I was disappointed and downright devastated to open the lovely packaging and find the cake toppled over with the sauce smeared across the bottom (see exhibit A); the box was never dropped and held securely the entire time (the handle is pretty impractical, though). With some restorative work, I got it looking... decent, and I suppose it all tastes the same when in your mouth, but at the same time, I feel like more should have been done besides taping the cardboard to the box (which probably made things worse since the cardboard alone remained intact :/), regardless of the price.

Overall, in the words of today's bakery supplier: I don't really get these patisseries with nothing in them. It's not really my style either and I would have liked more selection of varying price points like at other fancy patisseries in the city (and an intact treat!!), but besides this, Butter Avenue is good... just not as good as the green tea cream puff from Tsujiri I sampled on the same day at a fraction of the price. ;)

Rating: ***