Now presenting reviews of my favorite thing to eat: Sweets. (In case you hadn’t figured that out already.) For my first excursion, I kept it hyper-local and visited a place just up the street. I hadn’t been in for at least a couple years, so it was pretty much a new experience.

NAME: Sweet Cakes Bakery (website & yelp)

LOCATION: 901 N. Damen

WHAT WE ORDERED:  Medium coffee/rhubarb pie a la mode mini-cupcake/spinach and mushroom quiche (me) & large coffee/cinnamon roll/mango-something mini-cupcake (the Hubbs)

EXPENSE: $16

NOTES: I didn’t intend to have a mini-cupcake for breakfast. I was going to have a nice, well-rounded, seated-at-a-table brunch, but our restaurant of choice had a 30-minute wait. And we were hungry. For you, dear reader, I sacrificed a few inches of waistline and started my Sunday with baked goods.

I decided quiche was an acceptable, hearty breakfast choice. They warmed it up for me in the kitchen, which is viewable from a big, street-front window on Damen. The egg part of the quiche was downright custard-y in texture — super soft and much “looser” than what I’m used to making it home. The vegetables had great flavor though, and the crust — oh, the crust. Firm, but just enough give. It supported all the right places. REAL crust. My mom may be right. I might need to start making my own pie crusts. Sigh.

But now let’s talk about the real reason we visited a bakery for breakfast: Rhubarb pie a la mode mini-cupcake. Frosting = divine. Cupcake = delicious. I might have snuck a couple bites of the Hubbs’ cinnamon roll (in the name of science). This was a cinnamon roll that had a light syrupy glaze on top, instead of the cloying, gluttonous globs of cream cheese frosting that some places use. This was a cinnamon roll in which you could taste the flavor of the dough, see the texture of the crumb and the lovely golden-brown color. (The Hubbs says he prefers his cinnamon rolls “on the sweet side,” thus this was not his cup of, er, cinnamon.)

What he DID like, though, was “the mango thing.” He is a man who would happily eat cupcakes for breakfast every day. Clearly we’re a good match.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2011 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Chicago sweets, taste. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.