Caledonia Bakery

Bakery: Caledonia Bakery 
Address: 1492 St Clair Ave W, Toronto ON
Website: n/a
Style: Portuguese 
Price: $-$$

Although this area is called Corso Italia, there are in fact more Portuguese bakeries in the neighbourhood than Italian ones. Out of the many options, there is Caledonia Bakery, somewhat separated from the commercial strip of shops and, both for pedestrians and driver, rather a nuisance to get to. Parking can get scarce, as it shares its four stalls with the car wash directly behind it. Once inside, the bakery actually looks bigger than their selection. Sweets are only located on one side of the large L of glass cases and counter tops. They were particularly lacking, on a fairly busy Saturday afternoon, the typical baked goods you'll find in any Portuguese bakery. Yes, they had the usual cake slices, nadas (custard tarts), but as I'm particularly fond of the baked goods, I had a hard time deciding on what to get. Gone were my usual coconut and custard buns, but my interest was instantly piqued with this gigantic coconut ring.

It's huge! It's flaky! It's the coco-ring!

It took a couple blank stares, a whole lot of confusion on both sides, and two workers to figure out that I wanted the coconut ring (is there is a special name for this? Is it not a ring coated in coconut and stuffed with it too? O.o I thought it was pretty self-explanatory, even if I am the oblivious (i.e. non-Portuguese) buyer...), but I got it! ($8) I was actually complaining that very day following a trip to a French bakery that the reason I'm not too into Portuguese baking was because the dough, unlike French dough, is always too bready and really dense. It's often little more than a slightly sweetened chunk of white bread, sometimes with not even enough filling to make it exciting. I say this now because Caledonia seems to disprove it all; their coconut ring (I persist with my name, even though it's wrong :P) was by far the best Portuguese dough I've had! I feel like this is what others are aspiring to; this are Portuguese baked goods as they should be. Caledonia's was a variation of classic French dough: multi-layered flaky dough with delicious glaze and coconut on top. Crack open the top (and bottom, which was equally good) and you have soft, fluffy dough folded with equally distributed coconut, so you had it with every bite and, it being so huge, you got a lot of bites out of it. ;) This was so good and easily one of the best Portuguese bakeries I've sampled!

Rating: ***1/2