Cakes Sweets & Treats

Cakes Sweets & Treats runs on two clocks. One is the walk-in case, where a slice of Biscoff cake or a Portuguese custard tart leaves the counter the same afternoon. The other is the order calendar, where a standard bakery cake needs roughly four days' notice and a custom celebration cake books at least three weeks ahead. The Tyandaga bakery has worked that split since 2013, and it shapes how the place gets used — somewhere to grab a single treat on a Tuesday, and somewhere to plan a wedding or a milestone birthday around weeks in advance.

The cake list is where the range starts. The Biscoff cake stacks three layers with real cream, cookie butter, and crushed biscoff cookies; the Raspberry Sfoglia and Sfoglia Ferrero are built to be eaten the same day they are bought; Black Forest, Italian Rum, Lemon Lovers, and Strawberry Shortcake round out a spine of buttercream classics. These are the everyday cakes, the ones sliced for the case rather than commissioned, and they carry the flavours most tables reach for first. The Coconut Cream Pie belongs in the same company — silky custard under a generous cap of whipped cream, and one of the most-requested things in the shop.

Past the cakes, the counter keeps unfolding. There are Portuguese custard tarts and buttertarts, Turtle Cheesecake and Nanaimo bars, all-butter croissants, and a cupcake run that moves through Birthday Cake, Nutella, Red Velvet, Boston Cream, Coconut, Lemon, and Vanilla. Decoration is its own line of work here — buttercream showpieces, edible-image cakes, and one-off creations like the Confetti Cakesickles that turn a basic sweet into something built to be looked at. The same kitchen scales the other direction too, assembling dessert platters and bulk trays for office orders, parties, and family events. Smaller formats fill the gaps — Coconut Macaroons, single cupcakes, and slices for anyone who wants the cake without the whole cake. A table can leave with one piece or a hundred.

What makes this distinctive is the breadth itself, packed into a small-bakery format that usually narrows to decorated celebration cakes alone. The online shop runs past a hundred items, and the dietary lane is handled with the same candour as everything else: vegan and gluten-free carrot and chocolate slices are baked daily, the macarons and macaroons are gluten-free but not vegan, and nothing on the board is sugar-free. The bakery is just as plain about its edges — walk-in takeout only, no curbside, and no delivery except on wedding cakes. It reads less like a boutique than a working cake shop that happens to keep a department-store catalogue.

Custom work is where the discipline shows. A celebration cake begins as a quote request rather than an off-the-shelf pick, with flavours, decoration, and edible-image work settled in advance — the reason bespoke orders run to three weeks while the case turns over daily. Wedding cakes are the one thing the bakery will deliver; everything else is built for pickup. That occasion role has built a steady local following over the years, and Burlington readers have voted the bakery a runner-up among the city's bakeries two years in a row. Families tend to come back for the milestones rather than discover it once.

The rhythm here is a daytime one — open mid-morning, closed by late afternoon, dark on Mondays, the case fullest early and thinning as the morning's baking sells through. Sundays it opens only until early afternoon. The same-day sfoglia tends to go first, because it does not keep. Features rotate by the calendar and get posted fresh each morning, so the board through graduation season reads nothing like the board in December. For a single counter on Kerns Road, the work is less about reinventing the catalogue than keeping all of it moving before the day runs out.