St. Honoré Cake

For Shaun's birthday party on Saturday night, we bought a St. Honoré Cake.

For those of you who don't know what a St. Honoré cake is, it is a delightful cream puff cake with a filling of chantilly cream or chiboust cream (pastry cream mixed with Italian Meringue and flavoured with rum, coffee or kirsh) topped with vanilla cream and chocolate cream. There are many variations of this traditional Italian cake; here is a recipe from rec.food.recipes.

Since we didn't have time to bake a cake, we bought one from Carmelo's Pastry Shop at 1399 Commercial Drive (tel: 254-7024, no website) since Barb's favourite shop to buy it from, Fratelli (just a couple of blocks from Carmelo's down at 1795 Commerical, tel. 255-8926, no website), didn't have any left at 4p.m. on Saturday when we tried to buy it. Lesson learned: if you want a St. Honoré cake on a Saturday, you should reserve it!

Calabria Bakery at 5036 Victoria Drive (324-1337, no website) also has it and Mario's Gelati has an ice cream version! If you don't want to go to the East Side, you can also get it at Notte's Bon Ton downtown at 874 Granville (681-3058, no website) which has been serving and baking for 50 years!

Finally, here's an interesting story about the cake run on the St. Honoré Cake Shop chain in Hong Kong during the "Asian flu of 1997" from the Economist.