Pakerna

Pekarna
2313 Rue Sainte Catherine Ouest
Montreal, QC
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8 out of 10

I swear I will eat more salad…

It was brought to my attention that in my great Montreal Desserts adventure, I had overlooked a Slovenian shop just up the road from my house. I don’t know how I missed a wall of cakes. I walk past the shop all the time. Anyway, when I was told that it was better than a lot of the places on my top 10 list, my heart fell, my sugar headache intensified, and I resigned myself to another dessert excursion. Oh God. So much cake. Don’t get me wrong, I love cake, but there’s a healthy intake and then there’s just way too much. That “way too much” level comes a lot faster when you can’t digest butter-cream icing, and oh God I love ganache, and butterscotch, and mousse.

…and the commenter was right. This place is very, very good. Pure refined sugar. Nothing good for you. Ignore the lunch counter. You come here for dessert, pure and simple. It’s open late every day, weekdays until 11, midnight on Friday/Saturday, and 10 on Sundays. Right next to a movie theatre, it fit perfectly with my line about getting a piece of cake after a movie. I was skeptical at first because there were so many cakes in displays. Surely you couldn’t buy them all by the slice, but you could! Then surely they must come from a factory. They don’t. The café is owned by a Slovenian woman who bakes most of the cakes in a big, big kitchen on the south shore of Montreal. Her two daughters run the café and bake a few more cakes, cookies and squares in-store. No preservatives, real butter, real cream. Lots and lots of butter-cream.

There’s an oreo cake AND and an oreo cheesecake! Three kinds of chocolate cake including mocha, brownie (layers and layers of actual brownie separated by rich icing and called cake) and tiramisu cake (the ladyfingers are on the outside. I think one of the layers is also soaked in rum).

Or you can try a truffle. You can tell they’re home-made because they’re huge and they don’t look perfect.

Truffles are hard to make absolutely spherical and these are lopsided and coated in nuts or chocolate.

Then there are the “chubby nuns”…also called “Réligieuses”. Cream puff pastry filled with thick, intensely sweet maple cream, topped with maple glaze, and assembled in layers that look like a church with steeples, or nuns who have eaten too many pastries. Everyone deserves something that makes them happy. If it isn’t your vocation, there are worse things than sweets to fall back on…

Blasphemy aside, this is a shop full of (sinfully) sweet concoctions, and will bump a whole lot of Montreal desserts down the Top 10 list. Apparently you should try the apple pie, but with 4 lengths of counters filled with three-tiers of cake each, you have a tough choice ahead of you.

Oh, and the prices are low. Huge piece of flan for $2.99. Cakes around $4.25-$4.75. Big pieces of pie with flaky crust, even cheaper. Sounds too good to be true.

Pakerna
(514) 228-5222
Hours: Mon: 8am – 10pm, Tues-Thurs: 8am – 10:30pm, Fri: 8am – 11:30pm, Sat: 9am – 12am, Sun: 9:30am – 10pm