Foodie Rant - Properly Sauced? Try Properly Ripped Off.
Oprah-geddon: Winfrey To Quit Show In 2011
Daley Blames - Who Else? - The Media For Oprah-geddon
NYT Preps For Chicago Edition
Chicago Gets Googled
Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village have no shortage of places where Chicagoist can satisfy its sweet tooth. We love Alliance, Milk and Honey, Letizia's and Bleeding Heart Bakery, to name a few of our favorites. But one thing we've learned is that there is never too much of a good thing, especially when it comes to desserts. When we heard Sweet Cakes, a new bakery on Damen and Augusta was open we went over to check it out.
On a random weekday morning, the father-daughter team that run the place were welcoming hipsters and elderly Ukrainian women alike into the bakery We tried two items and both were fantastic and interesting at the same time. Our first item was a savory corn muffin with an entire hardboiled egg inside. The muffin itself featured a bit of asiago cheese, with chewy corn kernels dotting throughout the tender crumb. The unusual addition of the egg was appreciated, as it made the muffin filling enough for a small lunch. We also tried out a brioche aux amandes for dessert, a small brioche soaked in almond syrup with a frangipane on top. If Chicagoist could eat one of these every day for, say, the rest of our life, we don't think we would ever get sick of the tender pastry, perfectly sweet almond flavor and delicious crunch of the toasted almonds on top.
Sweetcakes is the latest in a string of small, independent shops to spring up on Damen in between Augusta and Chicago. In addition to Sweetcakes, we've seen A Vision reinvent itself as a wine shop, Dodo start serving dinner, and a new Italian restaurant called Piccolo preparing to open. If these newcomers do what they do as well as Sweet Cakes does what it does, we envision spending a lot more time on Damen.
Sweet Cakes is located at 935 N. Damen Ave (next to Dodo, behind an imposing fence). (773) 772-5771.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Is that a hard-boiled egg inside a blueberry muffin? Nasty!
NASTY NASTY!
Come on people, if you are going to comment, at least read the post! It's a corn muffin, and it sounds amazing! I'm definitely going to check this place out.
I just had one of these and I can confirm that they are indeed delicious. A little sweet, a lot of savory. The egg is genius.
some poor family probably lost their home so yuppie transplants could have their fancy sweetcakes. what, the other twenty trendy bakeries in the neighborhood weren't enough? you had to eat at milk and honey more than once per month?
why do you people only complain about gentrification when a condo is built?
Because local restaurants add something to a neighborhood; condos don't.
#5: that space was actually an empty restaurant for a long time. At least a year, I think. So no, no poor family lost its home. An empty restaurant was turned into a place where people living in the community can buy delicious things to eat. How can that be a bad thing?
#5: Yeah it really, really sucks when independent family businesses come in and mess up a perfectly good abandoned space that is zoned for retail/commercial purposes (and has been for quite some time).
It's been a while since ANY family, poor or not, lived in that unit. That stretch of Damen is specifically zoned as a "Community Shopping District" which disallows residences on the first floor of many of those buildings, including this one.
I eat a corn muffin for breakfast every other day practically, if I *ever* find a nasty hard boiled chicken fetus inside somebody's getting hurt.
It seems to me that Laura Oppenheimer is too literal and needs to educate herself on how gentrification works...