Coffee & Treats in Saint Ann

Frustrated by bakeries that lacked imagination, Laulie Cakes' namesake Laura began steadfastly whipping up custom confections in her home kitchen before moving into the business's first storefront in 2011. Each day of the week, Laura artfully bakes batches of traditional and specialty cupcakes and helps party hosts to plot out their soiree's sweets. The shops cake artists work with event planners of weddings and birthdays, embellishing cakes in the flavors and design of the customer's choice, whether it be a dulce-de-leche cake adorned in lovely swirls of realistic flowers or a coconut cake topped in fondant figurines of a bride and her ostrich groom. Cupcake vase centerpieces and other elaborate confections are freshly baked each day, often with help from Laura's young daughters, who share their mother's passion for great-tasting icing.

Established in 1902, Valenti's Bakery & Deli has been luring curious noses into its aromatic shop with baking breads and italian pastries for more than a century. Bakers slice up their signature italian and hearth breads each day before delivering loaves to numerous local restaurants. Display cases showcase colorful cakes, ricotta and cream cannolis, and assorted fruit and cheese stollens, and custom cakes showcase iced messages, flowery designs, or detailed furniture-assembly instructions. A full-service deli appeases appetites with hot sandwiches, holiday hams, and salsiccia sausages.

The cakesmiths at Cherie's Kitchen forge artful cupcakes, cookies, and cakes in the flaming maw of their double electric convection ovens. Inventive cupcake flavors such as pink velvet, mocha, and key lime strut around display cases in a livery of boredom-defying frostings, including salted caramel and green tea. When they're not catapulting baked goods into the mouths of hungry customers, the staff imparts their bakerly craft during classes that teach students the secret of whipping up homemade frosting and baking sundry pastries of all sorts, including cake pops.

From the first waft as you dive headfirst through Breadsmith's door and slither your way to its inviting counter, it's readily apparent that each morsel of tantalizing fare is made from scratch, trace amounts of sniff, and stardust. The family-centric bakery uses some of the finest, freshest, and most forbidden fruit-like ingredients to create the city's highest-quality breads. Breadsmith's list of dozens of breads changes seasonally and consists of many European-style and whole-grain loaves. April's daily bread offerings, for example, range from $2.79 to $9.50 a loaf and include French baguettes ($3.59), rustic Italian ($4.25) paisanos, sourdough ($4.29), heart-healthy flaxseed ($4.79), braided challah that'll make you hollah ($5.99), apple-pie bread ($6.99) that occasionally contains baseballs and pictures of Mom, and a few surprises. All of the bread is tenderly handmade and hearth-baked in a six-ton Bongard oven while being sung gentle lullabies.

A bloom of pastel sugar cookies sprouts from a foundation of peanut-butter and chocolate-chip cookies heaped at their base. This edible masterpiece, the BouTray, is one of Cookies by Design’s many inventive arrangements. For their creative displays, the bakers have been spotlighted on Home and Lifestyle TV. Once customers have selected their ideal cookie bouquet, cookie platter, or cookie house for displaced gingerbread men, pastry chefs personalize the fresh-baked treats with a written message or design.

Gwen Willhite founded Cookies by Design in 1983, when an unsatisfying brainstorming session about gift ideas led her to ponder one exciting question: why should flowers and sweets remain separate? Her solution was to design the cookie bouquet, where custom, hand-decorated cookies are displayed on sticks and arranged like flowers in gift baskets. Her invention quickly became a popular gift among locals, particularly those allergic to real blooms or too bashful to look at naked cookies.

Twenty-five years later, there are more than 200 Cookies by Design locations across the country. Each shop's team of bakers creates cookie baskets with a degree of care that matches Willhite's original vision, decorating and arranging sweet shapes for birthdays, holidays, and any other special occasion.