Gluten Free Garage – Part 3
This past Sunday Ryan and I went to the Gluten Free Garage at the stunning Artscape Wychwood Barns. I fondly remember the first event last year when I was amazed and thankful to finally have a gluten free event where local, homemade and natural foods were being showcased rather than the typical heavily processed and packaged foods at other events. It was such a great roster last year and that continued at this event too!
I like this event because I know I can find some of my favourite foods from bake shops and vendors I love, plus I get to try new new foods too.
Great venue at the Artscape Wychwood Barns
My absolute favourite discovery was that Bunner’s Bakeshop, whose Supersonic Gypsy cookies I love, has made the switch to soy free Earth Balance. Meaning that now I can eat so many more of their products… including their CINNAMON BUNS! Yes, cinnamon buns. Delightful gluten free, soy free cinnamon buns. They are amazing! I was impressed with their texture; so many gluten free baked goods are dry and crumbly, but not these. They were moist, full of cinnamon and had such delicious icing smeared on top of it! Thank you Bunner’s for making so many of your products available to those of us who are gluten free and soy free.
Bunner’s Cinnamon Buns…amazing!!
Another pleasant surprise was that Hero Burger had a food truck at the event. They were selling an entire gluten free menu of burgers, fries and poutine. Poutine? Yes please – I was all over that. After verifying that they had cleaned out the deep fryer, were using a fresh batch of Canola oil, and confirmed that the gravy was soy free, I was ready to dive in! Yum! I haven’t had a poutine since going gluten free 3.5 years ago, what a treat. Just a warning to everyone though, don’t assume that you can safely eat the Hero fries at their store locations. Many of them use the same deep fryer for products that contain wheat. But for now, I’m happy that I got to eat poutine again this one time.
Poutine!
Another one of my favourite bakeshops, Queen B Pastry had a booth at the event. I have enjoyed Queen B’s orange olive oil cakes and cocolime cookies for a while now. I love that they sell these two products in Crema coffee shops around my favourite areas of the city – The Junction, Greektown, Yonge and Bloor. At the Gluten Free Garage it was nice to be able to test out some of their new products too, including a good blueberry polenta biscotti.
Queen B Pastry samples
Tori’s Bakeshop‘s pink vanilla donuts were on all of the signs promoting Sunday’s event. I was excited to find out that they were gluten free an soy free. However, I was sadly disappointed with them. I personally found that they were very dry and didn’t have a donut texture. Maybe if it was a cake or loaf it would be better… don’t feel like your little donut needs to pretend to be something it isn’t. On the better end of the spectrum was their chocolate chip oatmeal cookie. It was delicious! I haven’t had an oatmeal cookie in so long, boy how it brought back the memories. It smelled amazing and was so soft and chewy. My only recommendation would be to make it an oatmeal raisin cookie instead. Just thinking of that cookie makes me want to get into my kitchen and start baking cookies.
While at the event, we drank a pumpkin smoothie from earth & city, who were also selling amazing looking, healthy beet wraps that I will need to try another time. We went home with our ‘Gluten Free Garage’ reusable bags full of delicious products: Mark’s “Nearly” Famous country sausages, Bix pizzelle, Dendy & Co Fine Foods Turkish Fig and Chive Polenta Crisps, and Organic Works quinoa honey bread.
It was another great event and we had a wonderful time!
