Tatte Cookies

I first read about Tatte Cookies, a bakery in Boston on the Cannelle et Vanille blog.  CV blog author, was in Boston attending a food styling and photography conference and wrote about Tatte as one of her stops in the city.  As a sucker for a new bakery, I could not help but click through and take a look at the Tatte website.  To my surprise, the website was fairly evolved with tons of pictures and information.  After another search on Google, it seemed that Tatte Cookies has been gaining its much deserved traction since its opening in 2008 in Brookline and well commented around the blogsphere too. 

The story of the owner is a classic tale of a girl who grew up baking at home with her mother.  As her passion for baking grew, so did requests from family and friends to supply holiday festivities and events with sweets.  Only when demand was steady did Tzurit Or make her move to open a retail store and expand supply and distribution around Boston and eventually NYC landing shelf space at Dean and Deluca in SoHo.  I love this simple, passion driven entrepreneurial story.  Her signature product, “nut boxes” (two pictures below) are rectangular pastries filled with toasted nuts and caramel are visually stunning as are the rest of her pastries.  Great article from Boston.com (Boston Globe) here to find out more about Or, the owner of Tatte Cookies.

photo via simplesong.typepad.com

photo via hungrybella.blogspot.com

photo via boston.com

Antique Wedding Theme

A childhood friend of mine is getting married in about five weeks time and I spent the afternoon with her today browsing for place cards and thank you notes. While we did not find anything that stood out, she did share her desire to create an antique theme or antique colour palette look at the event.  When I think of antique colours I think of pastels, golds, silvers, deep blue, deep purple and black.  So there is quite a range to play with if so desired.  My friend is sticking with a silvery, grey, violet colour from what I can gather from our conversation today.

When I got home, I thought about her theme some more and decided to do a bit of digging to see how an antique theme is interpreted online?  What does antique mean to people?  What colours do they choose to embody a vintage feeling?

Here are some ideas and colours that I came up with in my research:

photo via southern weddings magazine

Wedding Cupcakes

Great new blog about cupcakes is on the web called the cupcake decorations club.  It’s a how to blog about decorating, presentation and troubleshooting everything to do with cupcakes.  Looks like the author has been writing since Jan 09. 

This picture came from the site.  I love how symmetrical the cupcakes are displayed in this picture.

The white monogramed “m” on the lime background really pops against the purple ribbon on each tier.

photo via the cupcake decorations club

Cheese Wedding Cake

This weekend in the Toronto Star (newspaper) there was a great article in the Living section about alternatives to wedding cakes called “Let’s Hear Three Tiers for Cheese.”

While the macaron tower, croquembouche and bake sale smorgasbord were all contenders for cake alternatives, I thought the most interesting alternative was a wedding cake made entirely of cheese wheels.  The cheese cake featured in the article was by Afrim Pristine of the Cheese Boutique.  He has a blog dedicated to cheese and other gourmet delicacies that foodies would enjoy reading.  ( You can find Afrim’s blog here.)

picture from the article (photo via cheese boutique)

There is a nice explanation about why a couple would choose to have a cake made of cheese instead of choosing one of sugar on the Norbiton Cheese website.  From my perliminary research apparently cheese wedding cakes are quite popular in the UK seeing that most of the references I found are coming from across the Atlantic.

photo via norbiton cheese

Cupcake Crawl in Toronto July 4

FYI all you cupcake enthusiasts.

There is a cupcake crawl taking place tomorrow in Toronto starting in Leslieville at 12:30pm going until 5pm and then on to Sneeky Dee’s on College.

For more information, you can get details on Yelp.ca here or on Sweet Me Up here.