Portuguese Egg Tart For Sunday Breakfast

Review submitted by: Jane Ong

I admire people who dedicate their Sunday mornings to making home-made breakfasts.  To me, Sunday morning is when I make up the sleep I miss during the weekdays. The last thing I want to do after waking up from my long sleep on Sunday morning is to make breakfast, I don't even want to make coffee. Unless I have some compelling reasons to stay home on Sunday, then I will unwillingly make breakfast.  Otherwise, after I rise and wash up on Sunday, I normally just leap out of the door and drive to my favorite places to get breakfasts. I usually go to different places to have different types of breakfast from week to week, and today, I went to one of my favorite Asian bakeries to get my beloved Portuguese Egg Tart ($1.65), to enjoy with my favorite Iced Coffee (medium 85C Coffee from the same bakery for $2.75, equivalent to Starbucks "Venti" size). 

This Portuguese egg tart is almost as good as the famous one I had from Macau during my vacation there a few years ago.  This is actually the freshest and best tasting egg tart I ever had in America. (Well, the last time I had Portuguese egg tart in America was at a supposedly authentic Portuguese cafe in Sherman Oaks CA, which I didn't care for because it was cold and the pastry wasn't fresh enough for me. I wasn't impressed with the way it tasted either. )

I also like the iced coffee here better than Starbucks because it's not as bitter, but it's more flavorful and aromatic,  and it comes already perfectly creamed and sweetened.  Sunday breakfast like this is one of the reasons I put up with the high rent and ridiculous long commute to live in Los Angeles.

Bakery: 85C Bakery Cafe

Address:1735 W Carson St, Torrance, CA 90501 

Phone: (310) 320-8585

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These Desserts Are For Display Only

Restaurant Reviewed by: Jane Ong

My colleagues and I have been looking for a bakery in Toms River NJ where we can get good bread, cakes and more, because we just don't like the baked goods in ShopRite.  One day we stumbled upon a bakery in a strip mall after lunch. This bakery has vast display of numerous kinds of baked goods, from cookies to cakes to desserts.  The sight of the piles of colorful cakes and cookies made us hungry but we found it strange that we didn't smell that mesmerizing bakery fragrances we usually did at our favorite bakery back in Los Angeles. We didn't smell anything there.  The bakery at ShopRite actually smells better.

Despite our doubt, we bought a loaf of their "freshly baked" bread (which is cool in temperature) , a tiramisu (photo above) and a strawberry chocolate tartlet (photo below).

We would have been the very happy customers if only we bought the bread and desserts for our photo props only.  But we aren't in the business of photography, so we were upset that these baked goods were not quite edible.  The bread didn't smell or taste fresh at all.  Biting into that bread reminded us of the stories that our grandparents told us about World War II when food was scarce and fresh baked bread was non-existent.

The tiramisu was beautiful looking but it didn't taste anything like tiramisu at all.  We didn't like the hydrogenated vegetable oil that was used to whip up the cream. (We could taste it.) We think this tiramisu was an insult to Italian pastry.  The strawberry chocolate tartlet was again an eye candy but not quite edible to us because of all the hydrogenated vegetable oil that was used to make the cream and the tart shell. The tart shell actually tasted somewhat stale to us, and it had a bad texture. The chocolate mousse tasted like something that was made up of low quality powder mix.  These desserts were no better than the ones at ShopRite which we didn't like because of the artificial tasting ingredients that were used.

We will not go back to this Italian bakery again.

Bakery: La Scala Italian Pastry Shop 

Address:1231 NJ-166, Toms River, NJ 08753 

Tel: (732) 286-3686