Cookhouse [Mimi's World Tour]

Bakery: Cookhouse 
Address: 4-chome 1-17 Kintetsu Osaka-Namba, Nanba, Chuo-ku, Osaka
Website: https://www.cookhouse.jp/
Style: Japanese 
Price: $$ 

With a lot of Osaka's commercial development gravitating around its major train stations, many businesses -- including bakeries -- are located in the vast, insanely confusing network of underground shopping areas within and around these said train stations. This makes for some frustration, since it's really a pain to look for these underground bakeries (literally), but it makes for a pleasant surprise when walking through the train station as I was doing.


Cookhouse takes full advantage of Osaka's infuriating layout and has bakery locations splattered throughout the city; they have a whopping four in the Osaka-Nanba area in addition to a cute, animal-themed bakery that is also owned by them! That's a lot of cookhouse... One of these is a stall inside the Kintetsu Osaka-Namba station featuring the same kinds of baked goods I've seen in larger offshoots; this mostly includes a selection of Western-style sweet buns, sandwiched amid a more impressive array of more rustic bread and savoury buns. The sweets, I must say, look a little more generic and include red bean buns, chocolate and cream buns, a few resembling danishes, and those currently ubiquitous thick, fluffy pancakes. *rolls eyes* Though I was almost tempted to go for the little chick steam cakes! ^^

Well, it was no pancake for me. :D Instead, I took a perennial favourite: the cinnamon bun (162 yen with taxes). Unlike many cinnamon buns I encountered in Japan with either powdered sugar or a drizzle of icing, this was going in the all-out ooey gooey direction with its thick, almost impenetrable layer of icing on top and sticky and sweet cinnamon mass inside, though you really couldn't tell from looking at the outside. It had just the right amount of decadence. Fresh, fluffy dough, good cinnamon... maybe a little too much icing, but not bad for a bakery with three billion locations in Osaka. XP

Rating: ***