Half-Baked
By Amna Khalique | Food | Life Style | Published 16 years ago
If you are looking for that chewy, melt-in-your-mouth brownie or that soft, fluffy blueberry loaf, then the Blue Ribbon Boutique Bakery is not where your search ends. For that, I would suggest trying the other gourmet bakeries in the city which offer almost the same items on their menu as the Blue Ribbon Boutique Bakery does, only much better.
The bakery is a boutique outlet of the famous Blue Ribbon Bakers and Confectioners around the city (Hyderi, Nursery and Guru Mandir), that offers gourmet items such as New York cheesecake, chocolate truffles and red velvet cupcakes among other items. Although the menu sounds impressive, as do the pictures on their website and the décor which is part café and part bakery — the coffee, tea and green tea is priced at Rs 30 — the food at the bakery fails to impress.
The red velvet cupcake tastes just like regular sponge cake, except that it’s red, while the cream cheese frosting is too sweet and tastes more like sugar frosting than anything else. The plain brownies looked tempting, but were actually stale and required a fork to break it apart. The baby blueberry loaf looked absolutely divine but was, in fact, dense and dry. The chocolate truffles were better than I’d expected, but forgettable.
The saving grace for the bakery proved to be the bite-sized quiche, which everyone gladly ate after having tried everything else. The chicken patties were perfect with a flaky pastry and just the right amount of filling.
With massive publicity and marketing through fliers, the popular networking site, Facebook and their own website, one at least expected freshly baked food, given that this reporter visited it during the first half of the day.