Prairie Girl Bakery

Greetings cupcake lovers,

I was downtown today for a recruiter appointment and given the fact that I had paid a flat fee for all day parking, I was tempted to go for a walk into the financial district and 'pop into' PGB.  

This bakery was founded by a real life prairie girl, originally from Saskatchewan.  With the help of a professional baking team, Jean opened Prairie Girl Bakery up for business and has never looked back!  It has two convenient locations for those busy-bees working in the financial district: 18 King Street East and the First Canadian Place (concourse level).

It was of no surprise that there was a small line formed in front of the bakery's location in the First Canadian Place.  After all, it is the week before Christmas!  It was just last week that I had been browsing the bakery's website when I saw that their weekly special was an eggnog and vanilla cupcake.  I knew I was going to be downtown this week so I figured, why not give it a go??  Unfortunately, I missed the lesson on calendar weeks as a child and didn't realize that the special would have been different this week.  Slightly disappointed, I decided to test the infamous Joe Prairie's Red Velvet Cupcakes with Chocolate Cream Cheese with a swirl of vanilla icing.  I didn't just walk all the way from King and Spadina for nothing, right?

PGB prides itself on using only natural ingredients, thereby only selling fresh goods to its customers.  Be warned, just because it's natural, doesn't mean that it's healthy! In fact, PGB's chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing falls just short of 700 calories with approximately 30 grams of fat!!! It's no wonder the bakery does not have an accessible nutrition guide.  So the question is, was calorie worth it?

  In short, the answer is no!  Here's why:  

There are several things that I look for when I eat a cupcake.  The most important you ask?  The cupcake itself!  A lot of bakeries overcompensate for poor cupcake quality with their icing.  If I'm eating a cupcake, I'm more concerned about the cake than the icing.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not an icing hater by any means but I like to know that the cupcake can still be delicious on a standalone basis!    

I'm not entirely sure if I didn't get a so-called 'fresh' batch but given that my purchase was at 11:30am, I think it's fair to rule that out as a crutch.  I found the cupcake itself to be slightly dry, which was rather disappointing.  That being said, red velvet flavour satisfied my expectations.

Secondly, the icing was slightly overwhelming.  I will admit that I'm not a fan of overly sweet icing so the chocolate icing may have been a bad call on my behalf.  Even though I ordered a mini-cupcake, I found that the icing to cupcake ratio was too high for my liking.  The icing itself - pretty damn good.  There was a stark contrast between the chocolate and vanilla flavours which made this cupcake unique to other red velvets.  

Overall, I give this cupcake a 7/10.  So was it a good cupcake?  Yes.  The best cupcake in Toronto?   Doubtful.

- J