Heavenly Cafe

The cinnamon buns are a weekend event. Heavenly Cafe bakes them Friday through Sunday only, and they are the item the counter is built around — reason enough to time a Collingwood errand for midmorning, while a fresh tray is still warm. Around them runs the rest of the pastry case: carrot cake, dark chocolate mousse cake, French macarons, drinking chocolate. This is a European-style café and dessert counter first, and somewhere to have lunch second, run by an owner who came to baking by way of chocolate.

The lunch board reads like a pastry kitchen that learned to make a meal. Croissants do double duty as sandwiches — brie and apple, tarragon chicken — and the cold case carries tuna salad, egg salad, and smoked salmon with cream cheese on pumpernickel. There is a quiche Lorraine, a soup of the day that turns over through the week, and a house-made granola bowl for the morning crowd. A weekly special rides alongside the regulars, the one line on the board that changes without notice. Breakfast leans on croissants and bagels rather than a griddle, which is to say the kitchen's instincts are a baker's instincts before they are a short-order cook's. Nothing on the menu is engineered to impress at a distance. It is the kind of list a regular reads once and then orders from by memory, pairing a sandwich with whatever came out of the oven that morning.

What separates the café from a generic coffee stop is how local the sweets get once autumn arrives. Heavenly Cafe is a stop on the region's Apple Pie Trail, and when the Georgian Bay orchards come in, the counter fills with apple-harvest baking: caramel apple cinnamon buns, apple crumble tarts, apple nature bars. The handmade chocolate that started the whole enterprise is still in the case, paired with the pastries rather than shelved behind them. The rest of the year the register stays unapologetically European — the café calls itself a touch of Paris in Collingwood, and the macarons, mousse cakes, and afternoon-treat menu back the line up. The two impulses, Parisian pastry and Ontario apple season, sit side by side without any friction between them. It is a café that knows exactly which town it is baking for.

The path to that pastry case ran through fashion and chocolate. The owner, Heli Vogrin — named in local reporting — trained in fashion at Ryerson and worked in the trade before turning to sweets, beginning with a chocolate venture called Heavenly Sweets that eventually grew into the café itself. An Estonian family-cooking background sits underneath all of it, the early grounding that a fashion career interrupted and a dessert counter brought back. She opened the Collingwood café in 2010 and moved it to its current Cranberry Mews home in January 2016. The designer's eye still shows — in how the case is arranged, in the seasonal menus that change with the calendar — even if the daily work now is flour and butter.

Afternoons keep their own ritual. The café runs a high tea with both sweet and savoury courses, reset with the seasons, with vegetarian options by request and the whole service offered to take out or have catered; bookings go through phone or email rather than a form. The counter travels more broadly than that — sandwiches, cakes, and pastries all go out for takeout and catering, not just the formal service. High tea is the most formal gesture the place makes and its most European, the dessert counter reassembled into a sitting. A 2023 readers' choice poll named Heavenly Cafe a runner-up among the area's bakeries, which tracks for somewhere that has spent more than a decade making the same things by hand. The cinnamon buns still only come out on weekends. Regulars plan around it.