Maple Leaf Bakery

Bakery: Maple Leaf Bakery
Address: 1216 Davie St, Vancouver BC
Website: n/a 
Style: Canadian 
Price: $$

Maple Leaf Bakery is a no-frills bakery that looks like it's been here a while, with a hodgepodge of baked goods that span a wide range of styles that go from butter tarts and jelly doughnuts, to German baked goods, to British meat pies. They quite possibly might be the only non-Australian bakery to have Lamingtons! In some ways, Maple Leaf is a little like a dollar store: you never know what you can find in all that mess. ;) Well, except that in my case, it didn't cost a dollar or so....

Given its convenient downtown location, I was planning on making the trip to Maple Leaf regardless, but my excitement increased once I spotted the tray of poppy seed and walnut buns in the window. You so know what I was going for! :D Inside, I found the majority of items labelled and priced: cake slices and squares were around $2-3 and baked goods were all reasonably, if not pretty well, priced -- the couple in front of me paid less than $2 for a bag of buns.

Taking all that into account, I was stunned to have my poppy seed bun ring in at $5.25! Did the worker think I wanted more than one or something else? Nope. It was just the poppy seed bun. O.O But... but... that's so not worth it compared to everything else in-store! Granted, it ended up being bigger than I imagined, and I had to split it up into 2 1/2 portion; no one could possibly eat this in one sitting, and so I think it would have been better to reduce the size, and make it cheaper. Anyways, taste-wise, this was a pretty good poppy seed "bun" with tons of poppy seed just bursting from it. Especially at the ends, it was *just* poppy seed mass with no dough. The top was pretty unremarkable and the dough was a bit one-dimensional, but the poppy seed was tasty and flavourful. Good, but I probably wouldn't take it again for that price and would go for something else.

Rating: ***