Fine Bakery and Deli

Bakery: Fine Bakery and Deli 
Address: 3011 Lake Shore Blvd W, Etobicoke ON 
Website: http://finebakerydeli.com/
Style: Polish
Price: $$ 

On a quite cold Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I decided to return to Lake Shore in Etobicoke to check out one other deli that people online had mentioned had great baked goods. A trip to the deli proved that the review must have been outdated; at any rate, there were, besides three loaves of bread, no baking to be seen. Fortunately, the trip was not in vain, since I came away with two other bakeries for the reviewing. Nice. :)

The first of these two is yet another Polish bakery! Not to mention a Polish bakery where the bakery actually means there's some baking going on, this including their homemade cakes and baked goods. I was amazed the first time around with Peter's, but it's starting to look like common practice. Maybe it's just a GTA thing that delis just ship everything in and then call themselves a bakery... whoa, I really need to get out of the suburbs. O_O Anyways, Fine Bakery is, as I just said, a bakery with not too big a selection, but selection nonetheless with a few yeast baked goods, a sheet of sugar-coated Polish doughnuts, and a handful of distinct cake slabs, including several varieties of cheesecake, apple cake, and a few creamy tort-like slabs in the fridge. Nothing is priced and contents are pretty much based on intuition, which can be a little frustrating; they're not as cheap as other Polish bakeries either -- I paid $7.80 in total for two items: one poppy seed bun (probably around $1.50) and one of the smaller slabs of cheesecake (sold by weight; around $6.50)

And yes, you heard me right: they had poppy seed buns. ;) At first glance, it actually didn't look like it, since this style is usually reserved for plum or cheese buns, but the expert can always spot them. This turned out to be quite unique and so good, too! Fresh, fluffy dough wrapped around a delicious poppy seed mass, quite un-Polish if I say so myself, of pretty much pure poppy seeds, a couple of raisins and some sort of jam?? -- at any rate, something to make it stick and it seemed to have a bit of a tang to it. Top that off with icing and crumble; mmm, what a find!

The same can be said of the cheesecake. I was actually debating between the plain cheesecake and this one (I was also contemplating the fruit and meringue cake, but I was worried it would fall apart before I photographed it), but settled on this one because the almond crumble topping looked tasty. And I'm very happy I did, because not only did it have that tasty crumble with slivered almonds, there was a thin layer between that and the nice, fluffy cheesecake of apple jam. Not so overbearing as some Polish cheesecakes, this was lighter and had some complexity to it. Yummy!

In the end, I came across quite a few not only promising, but fantastic bakeries in the Etobicoke Lake Shore strip -- return trip, definitely.

Rating: ***1/2