BAKE CODE

Bake Code is a bakery specializing in Taiwanese style baked goods with locations in North York and Hillcrest Mall. Bake Code combines French baking techniques with Asian flavours to create delicious sweet and savoury treats. Bake Code has also partnered with Chatime to provide a reduced menu of Chatime’s most popular drinks (including roasted milk tea with herbal jelly!) Since the North York location opened last year, Bake Code has quickly become a regular stop on my way home for both a snack and my favourite bubble tea. I was recently invited to check out a new assortment of baked buns and desserts being introduced at a blogger event. In addition to tasting the new menu items, we got to go into the Bake Code kitchen and create our own speciality buns.

Disclaimer: All food and drinks reviewed below were provided complimentary. All opinions expressed below are wholly mine.

Two of my favourite breads at Bake Code are both sweet, the Multi-Grain Lychee roll and Sweet Taro roll. With the lychee roll, I love how the strong the fruit flavour is throughout the fluffy dough and I really enjoy the mochi like filling of the taro roll. The 4 new breads being introduced were all savoury.
Bacon Cheddar Twist – Long twisted bread with bacon, onion and cheddar cheese
Baked Pork Floss Puff Pastry Sandwich – My favourite, a sandwich made of puff pastry with a layer of pork floss and a layer of cheddar cheese
Sausage and Corn Bloom – A fancy twist on the classic sausage bun, sweet and salty
Pork Rou-Song Roll – A basic bread bun topped with a generous amount of pork floss and filled with mayonnaise

Any bread from Bake Code would make a delicious and filling snack. I like to buy 3 or 4 buns at a time, cut up half to munch on and freeze the other half for later. For diners eating in, Bake Code now offers a new toasting service.

Bake Code has also introduced an entire menu of desserts, including cakes, tarts, roll cakes and cream puffs. All of the cakes were soft and moist. I liked the lightness of the tiramisu cream puff and the matcha green tea roll cake. The natural flavours really shined through without being overly sweet. The lemon tart made with freshly squeezed lemon and lime coulis was also a good balance of sweet and tart with a great flakey crust. All three of the new roll cakes had an equal ratio of airy whipped cream to spongy chiffon cake.

While tasting the new menu items was already a treat, what made the evening extra special was getting to go into the kitchen at Bake Code and bake my own bread creations along with 5 other Instagrammers. Bake Code’s head baker, Chef Xiang from Taiwan, demonstrated how to put together two buns and we were then left to our own devices with 4 rounds a dough and a plethora of filling ingredients. There were sweet ones like red bean and savoury ones like shredded chicken and asiago cheese.

I tried my hand at creating 2 sweet and 2 savoury buns, which were baked while we sampled desserts. Once the buns came out of the proofer, doubling and tripling in size, we topped them with as many ingredients as we could layer. My most successful invention was a kimchi chicken filling topped mayonnaise, sriracha and green onions. Seeing the effort, and imagination that goes into creating each of Bake Code’s breads gave me a better appreciation for the bakers behind the scenes.