The Best Bakeries in Scarborough, Compared: Italian Pastry Counters, Character Macarons and Lebanese Baklava

Scarborough's bakery scene reflects the same thing its restaurant scene does — this is the most culturally varied part of Toronto, and the baking follows. You can get a traditional Italian pastry counter, an Asian dessert lab building macarons with cartoon faces, and some of the best baklava in the city, all within the same borough. What you cannot do is treat them as interchangeable. Here is how the main options differ and which one fits what you actually need.

Lamanna's Bakery: The Italian Counter

Lamanna's Bakery at 6758 Kingston Road, near Kingston and Sheppard, has been operating since 2004 and is the most traditional option on this list. It is an Italian bakery in the full sense — a pastry counter rather than a dessert boutique. The range covers sospiri pastries, traditional panna cotta, and custom cakes.

This is the bakery to choose when you want classic Italian technique and a proper counter experience: something to eat now with a coffee, and something to take home for the table. The custom cake side also makes it the practical pick for a celebration where you want a conventional, crowd-pleasing cake rather than something conceptual.

Daan Go Cake Lab: The Design-Led Option

Daan Go Cake Lab at 3380 Midland Avenue, near Midland and McNicoll, is the opposite end of the spectrum. It is an Asian bakery best known for character macarons — macarons decorated with cartoon faces — alongside cakes, cookies and ice cream built on Asian-inspired flavours. Its innovative miso butter tarts are a good indicator of the approach: familiar formats, unexpected flavour direction.

Daan Go is the right call when presentation matters as much as taste. The character macarons in particular are built to be given as gifts or brought to something — they photograph well and they land with children and adults alike. If you are buying dessert as an occasion rather than as food, this is the one.

Baklava and Lebanese Desserts

Near Ellesmere subway station sits a Middle Eastern bakery with a reputation for some of the best baklava in the city, alongside a wider range of Lebanese desserts. This category is worth its own trip. Baklava is a very different proposition from either an Italian pastry counter or a macaron shop — denser, nut- and syrup-forward, and better suited to being bought by the tray for a group than eaten as a single item with coffee.

If you are catering something, or you want a dessert that keeps well and travels, this is the strongest option of the three.

Others Worth Knowing

Beyond those, several Scarborough bakeries turn up consistently on local lists: Cake Talk, Gerhard's Cafe, Manzou Bakery and Elite Bakery. They are useful to know as alternatives when the higher-profile shops are busy or out of your way, and they extend the range further across styles.

How to Choose

Work from the occasion rather than the ranking.

For a birthday or a family celebration where you need a real cake, Lamanna's is the straightforward answer — custom cakes, long track record, traditional execution.

For a gift, a party contribution, or anything where the visual matters, go to Daan Go. Character macarons do a job that a slice of panna cotta simply does not.

For a crowd, or for dessert that holds up over a day or two, the Ellesmere-area Lebanese bakery and its baklava will serve you better than anything from a refrigerated pastry case.

And for an ordinary afternoon — a coffee and something sweet, no occasion attached — Lamanna's counter is the most relaxed of the three to walk into without a plan.

A few practical notes. Scarborough is large and these bakeries are genuinely spread out: Kingston and Sheppard, Midland and McNicoll, and Ellesmere are not a walkable cluster, so pick one rather than attempting a circuit. Custom cakes need lead time, often several days, so call ahead rather than turning up. Character macarons and specialty items at Daan Go can sell out, particularly on weekends. And if you are buying for a mixed group with different tastes, buying across two of these bakeries rather than loading up at one gives you a far better spread — the styles genuinely do not overlap.