Maple Castella - Blueberry Bun

Restaurant: Maple Castella - Review for Blueberry Bun
Cuisine: Bakery/Breads/Pastries/Desserts
Last visited: March 7, 2010

Area: Richmond, BC
#1068 - 8700 McKim Way (In Admiralty Cenre)
Price Range: $10 or less

1: Poor 2: OK 3: Good 4: Very good 5: Excellent 6: Tres Excellent!!

Food: 5 (6 for hits, 2 for miss)
Service: n/a (biased b/c they know me now)

Ambiance: 2.5

Overall: 5
Additional comments:

• Taiwanese bakery in Richmond
• Specializes in Taiwanese buns/baked goods (sweet & savoury)
• All breads/buns made on site daily
• Amazing breads and buns - cookies not as great though
• Bread are more on the sweeter side
• Always busy, familiar to locals and Chinese
• Taiwanese bakery not Cantonese - so buns are different than Chinese bakeries like Maxim's
• Closed Thursday
• Smells absolutely delicious inside and outside the bakery

**Recommendation: Pumpkin Bread, Pork Floss bread, Pork floss bun with the egg wrapped around it

I’ve written about Maple Castella on a few occasions and have really come to realize that when their breads are good it’s a 6/6 and when they’re not they’re really just okay.

I’m eating my way through all their items and so far, the best is still the pumpkin bread and the pork floss bread.

Everything is made daily and seriously the bread (the loaves) sells out as soon as it comes out of the oven. They only make about 12 loaves of each type of bread a day. It’s small bakery with a small operation so believe me when I say PRE-ORDER. Any of their loaves, even their white bread is sells out at the end of the day. The pumpkin bread is a guaranteed sell out in like 2 hours on a slow day.

On the table:

Blueberry Bun 2/6

• $1.10
• This looks better than it tastes.
• It’s one of their newer items so I was very excited to try it, but it didn’t impress me .

• The blueberry is like a jam with mini whole blueberries in it and it’s not very sweet. I wish there was more becuase I could really taste an blueberry flavour with so much bread. It was kind of like a Taiwanese style Danish.

• The bread part wasn’t even that good. Still quite soft and fluffy but not as much as their loaves. They can do better. It was actually a bit dry and it’s more neutral than it is sweet.

• The bubble like topping should have been more crumbly and sweeter. It’s usually more of a sweet crust made of butter and sugar that gets all crusty and crumbly when baked. This bubble crust was just bread-like.
• For me this wasn’t sweet enough to be a dessert, but more of a snack.