Loonie Bin & Bakery

Bakery: Princeton's Loonie Bin & Bakery
Address: 248 Bridge St, Princeton, BC 
Website: n/a 
Style: Canadian 
Price: $

Ah, I am such a sucker for puns and "loonie bin" for a dollar store is pure genius. In terms of store combinations, I'm not sure if the first thing that comes to mind is a dollar store and bakery, but with the dedicated in town already closed (before 3!?), I had to take a look.

The Loonie Bin is your standard independent dollar store with a bunch of random stuff that doesn't exactly cost a dollar anymore. It even smells like a dollar store. So, it is a little weird and exciting to turn the corner and find a display case featuring a small selection of baked goods. Everyone online seems to be raving about the fresh doughnuts, but there were none at all in sight. Actually, the shelves looked a bit... barren. Where were the doughnuts when I'm in town? -___-

Amid those empty shelves, there were sausage rolls, some sort of cake, as well as turnover and pastry sticks. After having read those aforementioned online reviews about fresh doughnuts and homemade baked goods, I was genuinely disappointed, especially since the latter two had an undeniably commercial look to them. Kind of like they'd been bought at Superstore as a pack, had been opened and were being sold individually. That fruity filling, that sugar-encrusted puffy dough... in all my bakery visits, I hadn't seen baked goods from a bakery looking so mass-produced in a very long time. I was getting really suspicious....

But it's not a review without the goods. That good was the raspberry stick ($1.50 each). Biting into it brought back memories of grabbing supermarket baked goods as a kid: it featured that typical, not-too flavourful pastry dough with the sugar on top. The notches in the dough were a little too evenly spaced and the two together were a little too identical. The raspberry filling was gloopy, not fruity and the presence of cream cheese (no, please, not cream cheese!) seemed to seal the deal for me. I'd love to give any small-town, local business the benefit of the doubt, but there didn't seem to be any "homemade baked goods" here.

Rating: *