Yummy Market

Bakery: Yummy Market
Address: 4400 Dufferin St, North York ON
Website: http://yummymarket.com/
Style: Russian
Price: $$

I was so certain that I did this review already that I just couldn't believe when I didn't find it on my list of posts. Yummy Market, with two locations in north Toronto and one in Montreal (still?), is a smaller supermarket specializing mostly in Russian products. It's like the Russian version of Polish supermarket chain Starsky. That being said, as a rule supermarkets never really have an impressive bakery section or most products are shipped in from industrial bakeries, thus making them not that fun or tantalizing. In this sense, Yummy Market is a bit of a game changer. I really didn't expect to find racks of in-store bread and baked goods and then to turn the corner and have a lovely array of cakes either baked by them or brought in from local bakeries. Of course, the commercial bakery goods still line the shelves, but there is something undeniably appealing about the doughnuts and sweet buns on wooden racks and all that cake.

The reason I was there in the first place was for cake. That usually means a trip to Richmond Hill, but I wasn't in the mood to make the trip so I decided to try this place out. In some ways, the selection is big, but the variety isn't. The vast majority of cakes are available both as individual and large-size cakes. Then many cakes are based on the same premise and most are a chocolate variant, which is always a little annoying, because I'm not that big a fan of chocolate cake. Perhaps half of cakes are not made by them, but brought in from, for example, Amadeus. The most interesting of the bunch are sold by weight as slabs, and aren't really celebration cakes... but taking a look at this I could not resist. I grabbed the Anechka ($25 piece, turns out slightly cheaper than buying a chunk by weight, $20 per kilo), a gorgeous multi-layered honey cake with prunes and walnuts and covered with dark chocolate shavings. Oh boy... this was an amazing cake! *-* The honey cake, the sour cream-based cream, the chocolate and biting into a nice chewy piece of prune... mmm, it may not be aesthetically appealing or look like a classic birthday cake, and that was the idea, but who cares when it tasted so much better?

 The cake alone would have garnered Yummy Market a higher rating, but as it stands, the racks of baked goods proved not to be to the same level. I took one poppy seed bun, but upon examining it later on, it looked a little familiar. Was it coincidence or was it indeed Empire Bakery? A dry, stiffer dough with an equally dry poppy seed filling that wasn't cohesive enough to form a real mass... I wonder. The pictures don't lie and I know my poppy seed (especially since I wasn't really a fan of Empire Bakery's version).

I also wanted to try some ponchiki, the classic Russian doughnut. I never quite realized they would be so dense and not fluffy. This is purely stylistic and ha ha I was a little disappointed nonetheless, despite it not being Yummy Market's fault. For the size, I'm not sure why they cost so much -- almost $2 per doughnut.

With the exception of that stellar honey cake, Yummy Market proves to be... another supermarket bakery, just with bonus points for having so much selection and interesting/unique goods.

Rating: **1/2