DaanGo Pastry Lab
DaanGo Pastry Lab is the patisserie iteration of Scarborough's famous DaanGo Cake Lab, headed by the former pharmacist-turned-pastry chef extraordinaire Christopher Siu.
Infinitely smaller than the original bakery on Midland Ave., this Baldwin spot takes over the old Red Natural Food stall where its owner Maria Sandhu once sat amidst boxes of nuts and beans.
With no seats and barely enough room for a handful of people, the Pastry Lab is built for grab-and-go orders of Siu's refined desserts.
Due to space constraints—it really is quite tiny in here—cakes and macarons are shipped from the Scarborough DaanGo while the new line of pastries are made in-house.
Same as at the Cake Lab, Siu's famous cartoon macarons fashioned in Pooh Bear- and Totoro-likeness are up for grabs at $3.50 each, or $20 for a box of six.
Aside from a handful of cakes like gluten-free pumpkin or sesame and matcha, which are $6.50 each, the most exciting draws here are definitely the six newly-introduced pastries which are almost too precious to eat.
The Lucky Duck ($7) almond dacquoise with a layer of lemon curd and pistachio cremeux in a plastic mini bathtub is very dainty and cute.
Chocolate ducks are moulded, filled with chocolate pearls, and assembled before being painstakingly hand-painted one by one.
They're then placed atop some soft white chocolate foam over almond sponge and sprinkled with pistachio bits and more mini silver chocolate balls.
The Tira-Meow-Su with marscapone creme is equally adorable if not more so.
Sitting in a cup made of dark chocolate is vanilla chiffon, which is soaked in a cold brew syrup that has Kahlua, coffee extract and ground coffee that's been steeped for 24 hours before being strained.
Marshmallow cat heads and tails are arranged carefully in some white chocolate foam before being finished with some cocoa powder.
The Banoffee Jewel is a standout dessert, and would make a nice little birthday treat.
Made from dark chocolate, the jewel can be cracked open to reveal its delicious insides of peanut butter cremeux, almond chocolate dacqoise, salted caramel, and sliced bananas.
It'll probably get messy but the disaster is well worth the deep peanut buttery deliciousness.
Siu has also made a couple of cacti-themed treats: the Firma is a vanilla wafer with salted caramel, pastry cream and roasted banana. Meanwhile the Terra has more Asian flavours with red bean paste and matcha pastry cream coating a chocolate vanilla wafer.
And for proud Torontonians, The 6ix pays homage to the city with a plexiglass-moulded skyline made from meringue and a CN Tower made of white chocolate, sitting on an interesting duo of avocado coconut mousse and lime cheesecake.
You won't be able to find any of these new pastries at the Scarborough DaanGo (except for the Tira-Meow-Su, occasionally) so if you're a fan of adorable sweets with plenty of attention to detail, a trip to this little shop is a Kensington must.
Hector Vasquez