Coffee & Treats in St. Catharines

The Designer Cookie blends fresh, high-quality ingredients into a slate of gourmet sweet eats. Load a miniature trebuchet with artfully crafted gourmet cupcakes ($2.75) or encourage the banana cake and chocolate frosting of the Dolce & Banana to sashay down the catwalk of the esophagi. The Michael S'Mores cupcake offers a tempting triumvirate of roasted marshmallows, graham cracker, and chocolate, and gourmet cookies contend for taste buds' affections in flavours such as Guy LeCrunch, laden with Hershey's Skor bits, chocolate covered pretzels, and chocolate chips ($2.75). Customers can also opt to custom design cookies that sprinkle a choice of dough with up to 25 different mix-ins ($2.75+ each, minimum 12 cookies/order). The Designer Cookie whips up celebratory treats as well: birthday cakes in flavours such as lemon meringue, mud pie, and banana caramel maple ($59–$69 for a 10") make delightful sugar-laced centrepieces for birthdays, anniversaries, and hot air balloon capers.

Saint Cinnamon slings sweet, sticky, swirled sustenance into Toronto's taste portals with its world-famous cinnamon rolls, made in full view of the customers. Savour the flavour of piping-hot pastries with a dozen of Saint Cinnamon's Little Cinns—smaller than the bakery's regular-sized rolls but just as delicious and much easier to shove into the pockets of gym shorts for mid-marathon snacking. Customers with wheat allergies or gluten-rejection syndrome can redeem their Groupon for $14.99 worth of spelt or gluten-free baked goods at Saint Cinnamon's Pickering location only.

For the Love of Cake, helmed by cupcake countess Genevieve Griffin, offers dessert desirers freshly baked cupcakes made with quality ingredients. The bakery's 4-dimensional cupcake particularly stands out, with its multi-layered melding of cake, filling, topping, and garnish selected and arranged to yield a cohesive, complementary, and Facebook ready flavour profile. The decadent treats come in more than 20 flavours, and the bakery offers at least nine of those flavours each day. (Check the sweet spot's Twitter feed for daily offerings.) The Strawberry Shortcake cupcake injects juicy strawberry purée into its angel-food-cake fluff and tops it off with whipped cream and a strawberry slice, and the Crazy Carrot cupcake puts a pit of pineapple filling under a crowd of cream-cheese frosting and a candied carrot. Suffocate sweet teeth with the chocolate overload of the Death by Chocolate cupcake, or freshen up a frosted feast with the mint overtones, moist chocolate, and icy wit of the Grasshopper.

The Green Grind marries eco-friendliness to enticing coffee and tea selections through its sustainable practices and by offering fair-trade-certified and organic brews. Java junkies can satisfy crippling caffeine addictions with a large cup of locally roasted coffee ($2.20), a large espresso ($2.50), or a single-shot cappuccino ($3.20), and sensitive-tongued taste fiends can coolly sip on a Kombucha Wonder Drink ($3.50). Sail seas of tea from a pot ($3.75) of loose-leaf such as Earl Grey or blueberry rooibos, or sidle up to a glass of iced tea ($2.50), made fresh daily and available in a fruity peach, blueberry, or lemon flavour. Lattes, mochachinos, steamers, and hot chocolates are also available for drinking or dipping celery stalks into.

Toting a modest selection of chocolate confections and candies, Joseph A. Fowler entered the 1901 Pan American Exposition hoping to plant the seed for a business in his newfound home of Buffalo. The company—founded in 1910—grew with each successive generation, and more than a century later, Fowler's celebrated chocolates continue to placate palates at six New York retail locations. The chocolatier has become synonymous with treats such as milk- and dark-chocolate truffles dubbed truffaloes, as well as sponge candy, which boasts a molasses-like flavor and an initially hard texture that quickly melts in the mouth. Like Count Chocula’s hairpiece, all of Fowler's fine-chocolate treats are crafted from the seeds of the theobroma cacao tree and use up to 60% cocoa solids for a rich cocoa flavor.

Occupying the same spot on a blacktop parking lot since the 1950s, the walk-up windows at Fran-Ceil Custard jog nostalgic memories of generations past. Although the sweetery has been under its current ownership for the past 30 years, the legacy of the shop's namesake Frances and Celia—wives to founders Tony and Michael—lives on not only in name, but also through the same French-style custard that has filled cups for more than half a century. A rotating menu of weekly flavors, such as pistachio, tangerine, or black raspberry, spirals into cones alongside the original chocolate and vanilla custards, and 13 varieties of hard-scoop ice cream form a decadent base for banana splits, fudge brownie sundaes, and poorly constructed suspension bridges. Over the years, homemade sherbets have been added into the mix, making rotating batches of lime, raspberry, and orange scoops.