I can’t believe it’s not a muffin
Mini frittata star of the show at Fantail Bakery Café
It’s one of those inventive foods you didn’t know you’d want until it calls to you, enticingly, from behind the counter.
The hand-held frittata. Round like a muffin with a golden, puffed-up top, it’s cradled in the same white parchment cups as those floury confections.
But, made of nothing more than vegetables, egg, cream, a bit of cheese and simple spices at Fantail Bakery Café, a spacious Roncesvalles Ave. eatery, it’s a much healthier option.
“It’s hard to find little nice breakfast things,” says creator Michelle Turpin, 39.
Customers have been snapping them up. Since Fantail opened about seven months ago, co-owners Holly Mayclair, 32, and Turpin, cooking with one tiny induction burner and one stove, have had to double, almost triple their daily production.
All of their items — an assortment of individual cakes and puddings, brioche buns and giant meringues — are made by hand, so they’re always busy.
The frittatas ($6) — along with everything else — practically leap from the shop’s front case within moments after emerging from Fantail’s back kitchen. Weekends are especially hopping.
Mayclair and Turpin rarely — if ever — take a moment to rest.
“We’re like, wow — they’ve sold out!” Mayclair says, of the frittatas and other items. “And then we’re like, oh no, they’ve sold out.”
Really, it’s their own fault. The idea for a personal, muffin-like frittata came to Turpin shortly after she, her brother Jarrah Turpin, 33, and Mayclair, a cousin, decided to open up the shop.
Aside from scones, she noticed the city’s bakery-scape lacked small, individually eaten savoury items. And this one bore all the hallmarks of the trio’s “unconscious” desire to be “really healthy.”
The native New Zealanders grew up in remote parts of the lush country with “self-sufficient hippie parents,” Mayclair says.
They lived off the land, picking their produce by hand from the field outside, raising chickens and goats, and making their own bread, preserves.
It was on a road trip up north in Ontario two years ago when their intuitive cooking ethos — the organic, local, fresh, in season, minimally processed, wholesome one that every foodie clambers to eat like today — came up.
The trio, all artists working with different media, had had some success baking for festivals around Ontario and decided to open a brick and mortar spot.
When Turpin found the location — she is a fashion designer and it is close to her other shop — it was a go. Jarrah, a fine woodworker, did the eatery’s benches and framing. Holly, a painter, hand-painted the tiles that gleam when the sun streams through the large front windows. The relatives’ artistic sensibilities come out in every dessert.
Back to the delicious frittata, cradled in white parchment paper as if it’s dressed in a starched collared shirt. The vegetables, which change frequently, are always tender and juicy; the egg is silky. The cheese — whatever sort they fancy to add on any given day — adds tang.
This frittata is fun to hold and to eat. So was every single item at Fantail that I had the pleasure of devouring. The sticky toffee pudding as well as the giant meringues and polenta cake are new favourites.