Take out

As most people know I am fairly lazy. So when my kitchen is messy (usually) and I don't feel like cooking (often) I try to find cheap food elsewhere. Ding Dong Bakery on Spadina is a good, inexpensive Chinese bakery. I'm not crazy about everything baked and Chinese but after several visits I think I now know what to buy and what not to. I like everything on this plate but the curry beef in the bun is a bit too sweet for me. I will have to only buy the flaky curry (I assume it's beef, it didn't say) pastries from now on.



I had never tried any of these before but I already knew I was not a huge fan of glutinous rice. It must depend on the preparation because I love the little mochi balls filled with red bean paste or ice cream that the Japanese make. The rice was more normal in the rice/mushroom/pork thing and it even had real, tasty mushrooms and pork (wow!) but everything tasted too strongly of Chinese cooking wine. The cupcakes are very plain, basically just a tall paper cup filled with spongecake. If I were to make a spongey cupcake in those dimensions I think I would have a couple of layers of jam or some sort of cream to make it more interesting, but maybe that would be too much.




And sometimes you just want a big, cheap burrito. Fulla beans.




This is pumpkin bread with a ricotta icing. I figured if you can make cream cheese icing, why not ricotta? Italians sweeten ricotta and put it in a shocking number of desserts so I assume it must be somewhat edible. First of all, I should have drained the ricotta better so my icing would be thicker. I thought the taste was good and (other than the thinness) the texture was good. I had to attack the ricotta with an immersion blender for a bit to make it nice and smooth.