Coffee & Treats in Warrenville

It can be rough feeding a family, with parents figuring out how to find time to prepare healthy, delicious meals and still complete their long, grueling work schedules. That’s why Shane and Angie Huber at U-Bake decided to help their clients hurry dinner to the table by specializing in prepared, take-and-bake dinners and meal supplies. This allows their regular shoppers to easily and efficiently assemble entire meals with only an oven, a stovetop, or a third and final genie wish.

Though they’re known for their housemade dough, including pizza dough and more than 50 types of cookie dough, they also sling pastries, dry and frozen soups, and jellies and spreads to enhance any main course. They help families cope with dietary restrictions without compromising taste by whipping up a variety of gluten-free items, and their website promotes creative culinary pursuits by featuring signature recipes that only require ingredients you already have in your kitchen.

Reese's Gourmet Banana-Mana's sweetscrafters whip up a diverse menu of desserts showcasing their own spin on banana pudding infused with fun flavors. Nine-ounce cups, 9"x11" pans, and 3-foot-deep kiddie pools of the fruity confection can be served frozen, as a chilled pudding, or heated into a sugary plasma. Crunchy cookies sink into the surface of the shop's eight varieties, with such flavors as original banana, lemon crunch, piña colada, and cappuccino.

After roasting coffee beans with his family in Pakistan, Arshad "Sony" Javid—founder of Café Descartes—indulged his love for the caffeinated drink by making pilgrimages to coffee houses in Asia, Europe, and South and Central America. In 1991, after a stint as a Starbucks barista, Sony opened his first shop, an espresso cart on the UIC campus, where he poured his decadent drinks to quench the thirst of students, professors, and dry textbooks. Today, the aficionado’s dream has expanded across six Chicago cafés, where warm, earth-toned walls, cushy armchairs, and the smell of fresh-roasted beans beckon customers to stick around for a latte, mexican mocha, or sweet pastry.

Lilly Jane's Cupcakes' founder Kerri Dunn took the name for her dessert shop from her two grandmothers, Lillie Russell and Phyllis Jayne LeValley. As a little girl, she spent countless hours learning how to bake within their kitchens where many of her original cupcake creations were born. Today, these creations bake to fruition within the pink walls of her own space. Staffers pile buttercream onto 9 to 12 rotating cupcake flavors such as Super Chocolate and Strawberry Fields–a white cake infused with strawberries and topped with strawberry icing. They also design custom sugar cookies to help make graduating, getting married, or being really, really hungry more special.

Since its 1981 Arkansas inception, TCBY has churned out chilly yogurt-based desserts brimming with real dairy and live active cultures. Operations now span 450 stores nationwide, updated for the digital confection age with chic décor, a modernized logo, and nutrition facts easily available. Twenty-eight soft-serve flavors spill forth from spigots in gourmet varieties such as white chocolate and mango sorbet, as hand-scooped options meld sugary cream and salty nuts with dollops of butter pecan or mocha almond. An array of toppings such as syrups, nuts or crumbled candies customize each chosen dessert, and juices, fresh fruit, and yogurt meld to form Beriyo smoothies such as the Pom Berry Blue.

Behind John Dough Bakery's brick façade, a display case flush with pastries and shelves stacked with bread loaves volunteer ocular and aromatic reasons to sit and nosh. A lunchtime menu contains classic American sandwiches accompanied by pickle spears and kicked up with components such as fresh goat cheese. Half-soup, half-salad fusions sate indecisive eaters and Harvey Dents, and bite-size confections covered in chocolate or drizzled in icing satisfy sweet tooths.