Japanese-style Baked Good from Chinese Bakery

This baked good, filled with sweet red bean paste, is a Japanese-style baked good done by Chinese bakers (you can see both the Japanese characters and stylized Chinese characters). There is a vendor located just inside the entrance of the Dragon City mall at Spadina and Dundas, who sells what I always think of as Chinese waffles, I've never tried them, I believe it's a sweet egg dough, but the dough in this baked good reminds me of those waffles.

Regardless of it being Chinese or Japanese, it tasted pretty good.

Lindt Individual Chocolates

In our recent trip to the Lindt Outlet Store, we picked up several small individual chocolates, each of them about 1/2 oz in size, perfect for a bite or two of good chocolate.

The Bianco is white chocolate. Fine if you like it, not for my tastes.

The Extra Bitter is a dark chocolate, or bittersweet, it tasted very good.

The Latte is a milk chocolate, it tasted not bad.

The Gianduja is made from a mixture of sugar, chocolate and hazelnuts, it tasted really good.

The Surfin is chocolate truffle, it tasted quite good. I would like to try a larger bar of it.

The Fioretto is chocolate mixed with crispy rice, inside is hazelnut paste. Quite good.

Ethiquable Dark Chocolate with Orange

I must remember that I don't like the combination of orange and chocolate, I keep buying new chocolate bars with that flavour, perhaps I hope that one day I will find one that I will like. I don't like especially the ones with candied orange peel, this chocolate bar from Ethiquable uses orange pulp instead of the peel, but also sadly suffers from a weak orange flavour. The cacao content is 60%, and the cacoa beans are Fair Trade from the Dominican Republic. The ingredient listing is good, cocoa paste, cocoa butter, cane sugar, candied orange (made of orange pulp, sugar, apple, pineapple fibres, dextrose, sodium alginate, dicalcium orthophospate, citric acid and artificial and real vanilla flavour) and soya lecithin.

How did it taste? I did not really find this chocolate bar tasty, the chocolate itself was not bad, but the orangey-ness did not do it for me. I won't buy this bar again.

President's Choice Dulce de Leche

Every year at this time, before Christmas, President's Choice comes out with a number of new and interesting food products. This year is no different, and the first of the bunch that I saw, that I was interested in anyways, was this caramel creme spread. Dulce de Leche is a milk-based syrup popular in Latin American (President's Choice sourced this dulce de leche from Argentina), one prepares it by slowly heats sweetened condensed milk (often still in the can) to produce something very similar in flavour to what North Americans call caramel. You can use it as a spread on bread or toast or waffles, as a crepe filling, or as a filling or sauce for various cakes and other desserts. The ingredient listing of this version is whole milk, sugar, corn syrup, sodium bicarbonate, potassium sorbate and artificial flavour.

Green & Black's Ginger

Wow, I like ginger, and if you like ginger too, and specifically the taste of dark chocolate and ginger together, then this is a great bar for you. Green & Black's is a British Chocolatier with a presence in the United States, they produce mostly Organic chocolate bars. This offering, with 60% cacao content, is one-sixteenth of their whole Organic chocolate bar line, they also sell cookies (biscuits, as they say in the UK), ice cream, cooking ingredients (such as baking chocolate, cocoa and hazelnut chocolate spread), hot chocolate, and cereal bars; though, a lot of these are available only in the UK, in the US, and Canada, there are fewer offerings, and some different. I see too, that they have a Cookbook, called Unwrapped.The ingredient listing of this chocolate bar is good, Organic Cocoa Mass, Organic Raw Cane Sugar, Organic Crystallised Ginger (20%) (Organic Stem Ginger, Water, Organic Sugar), Organic Cocoa Butter, Soya Lecithin (as an emulsifier) and Organic Vanilla Extract.

How did it taste? Very gingery, if you don't like ginger at all, then don't even try it (but then why would you even buy it...). The dark chocolate is smooth and tasty, with a good smell. The ginger pairs very well with the chocolate. I would definitely buy this bar again.

Purdy's Chocolatour

Purdy's Chocolates is a Vancouver, B. C. based Chocolatier, who has made recent forays into Ontario, opening 7 stores in the past while. I recall two or three years ago, when they first appeared, in Square One in Mississauga, where they opened a temporary booth just before Christmas to sell their chocolates, one of their competitors, Laura Secord, got all puffed up at their intrusion, and, immediately after Christmas, when Purdy's had left, they erected a very similar booth in the exact same spot.

We had heard about this Chocolatour they were having at the large shopping mall Vaughn Mills, only on till Nov. 14th unfortunately, we went there to check it out. The Purdy's store located near the Food Court, and as we got there, we were in time for a taste testing of their milk chocolate, they were comparing it with a competitor's offering. I must admit that the Purdy's did taste better, and was darker in colour, and less sweet than the competitor's, though I wished that they had taste tested their dark chocolate instead. We perused their store offerings, and came across some interesting things, one of them was this rather large three kilogram milk chocolate Santa, retailing for about $130!

The Chocolatour consisted of lots of statues and descriptive, including a huge cacao pod

a Spanish trading ship that was used to bring cacoa from the New World

lots of examples of molds used in making chocolates

and a temple used for ancient worship by the Indian tribes who provided the Spanish with their chocolate.

Dufferin Grove Farmer's Market

My beautiful Bride and I had the opportunity to finally visit Dufferin Grove Farmer's Market. I had read about this Toronto Organic farmer's market somewhere and wanted to go see it; having sent her the link, she wanted to go too, so we set off one Thursday after work to check it out. The farmer's market is located in Dufferin Grove Park, across from Dufferin Mall, one block south of Dufferin TTC Station on the Bloor Subway line. It is every Thursday, year round; when the weather is nice, it is outdoors, in the winter, some of it moves indoors to the rink house. It seemed fairly small when we first got to it, but there were some great highlights. ChocoSol features chocolate from Oaxaca, Mexico, which is ground using bicycle power, I tried some of their samples, and they're quite tasty, though I did not purchase any. Nujima Living Foods has a whole variety of interesting nutritional grains and seeds and roots, I bought some Mesquite Pod Meal (which I had been looking for a lone while for) and some Chia Seeds (or Salba seeds), I was also interested in their Maca Root powder and their Cocoa Nibs (Raw Chocolate). There was a vendor who sold a variety of interesting dried mushrooms, we saw morels and chantarelles, lobster mushrooms and others, they also had black walnut meat. We bought some Dinosaur, or Black, Kale from a vendor, that was quite tasty.

I wish that there was a market like this close to my home in Mississauga, I would definitely come by more often, this one, unfortunately for me, is too inconvenient for me to visit more than once a year, but don't let that stop you from checking it out, there are some good finds there, artisan breads, organic fruits and vegetables, different kinds of honey, interesting cheeses, and lots more.

Restaurant Review - Latinada Restaurant

The Spanish restaurant Latinada is located at 1671 Bloor Street West, that's just two blocks or so east of the Keele TTC Subway station in Toronto, on the south side of the street. I like Latin American food, and enjoyed the food greatly in my two visits to Venezuela. Entering the restaurant, I hoped that they had some of the delicacies I fondly remembered. My beautiful Bride had recommended this restaurant, she had been there a year before with another friend, and she had wanted to go there again, to revisit it and to show it to me, so we took the opportunity when we were in town to go there. The inside is quite cosy and rustic-looking, we chose a seat next to the window, at the opposite end of the room sat several people enjoying good conversation and some alcohol, at the bar. This is a Tapas bar and restaurant, tapas are small dishes, or appetizers, we chose two, one being Yuca Frita, which comes with pico gallo on the side, the other a spicy chorizo sausage. Yuca, as I knew it in Venezuela, is prepared two ways, one of them deep fried, or frita, the other boiled; I'm not sure which I liked better, but I chose the Yuca Frita. We both enjoyed it. Chorizo is spicy sausage, though this version did not turn out to be that spicy. As our main meals, I chose the Camarones Al Ajillo, which is Garlic Shrimp, and comes with Cuban or white rice, Avocado Salad and Patacones. My beautiful Bride chose the Salmon, it is cooked with white wine and garlic, and also comes with those same three sides. Patacones are deep-fried plantain cakes, quite tasty. The Cuban rice was made with kidney beans, rather than black beans, which I am more familiar with. The Avocado Salad was quite delicious, I normally don't like avocado, but enjoyed it with lime juice and greens and tomatoes. Both of our entrees were delicious, I wonder why there were hardly any patrons, perhaps this was an off night. They do have live music a number of times a month, featuring Latin artists, it should be a happening place those nights. Upstairs, too, there is apparently an art gallery. If this was not so inconvenient for me to get to, I believe I would come more often.

Wild Blueberry Cookies

I like blueberries, as you might know, especially the wild version. When I came across this recipe, I knew that I would have to make it. Though, on closer inspection, I couldn't see how it would work, so I changed some of the flour to self-rising and some of it to spelt flour. Later, I saw that I missed that you were supposed to add a beaten egg, after the creaming of the butter and sugar, but it seemed to work just fine without it. I lowered the amount of blueberries, they did not seem to "fit" inside the dough, but feel free to add more. Too, the original recipe called for 1 teaspoon of lemon flavouring, I didn't add it, also, I suppose that you could add vanilla instead. These tasted pretty good despite, or perhaps because of, the changes, the consistency of the cookie was cakey, the blueberries, which I thought would burn or fall out, worked great.

Wild Blueberry Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1 cup cane sugar
1/2 cup rice milk
1-1/2 cups self-rising flour
1 cup spelt flour
3/4 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Preheat oven to 375F/190C. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Whisk together flours. Cream butter and sugar. Add rice milk alternately with the flour to the creamed butter. Fold in blueberries.

Drop 1-1/2 inches apart on cookie sheet. Bake 14-16 minutes.

Salzburg Sweets Haselnuss-Schnitten

These crispy wafers with hazelnut cream filling from the Austrian company Salzburg Sweets I far prefer over the recently reviewed Manner Haselnuss-Mignon.

For one thing, it's not overwhelmed by a coating of chocolate, the focus of the taste is the hazelnut cream. Too, the hazelnut flavour is stronger, there seems to be a higher percentage of hazelnuts (the ingredient listing is probably very similar in the two products, mostly sugar, of course).