Inspiration & Creativity at Roselle
One of the questions we get asked most frequently is: where do you get your inspiration for new desserts from?
First and foremost, we are inspired by things that we love to eat. Steph and I are fortunate to do something that we love for a living. We are obsessives about food and desserts. That means we spend our weekends and time-off eating. The desserts that we discover and learn to love in our free time is often a starting point for creating new desserts for sale at the shop. We’ve been “eating professionally” for almost 10 years now. When we try new desserts or flavours, we will take notes on what we enjoyed specifically about them.
Having said that, we would never copy a dessert directly and just put it on the menu. Instead, we’ll use it as a starting point and we’ll put our own twist on it. A great example of this process is our maple & black walnut medovik. We were introduced to this cake by our friend Vanessa T in 2018. It was a cake that she made for us to try during Cake Day. It was delicious and beautiful. In 2019, on a trip to San Francisco, we got to try the much-loved version of the medovik at 20th Century Café in Hayes Valley. We were moved!
It took us awhile to figure out how to put our own twist on this cake. It wasn’t until we met our friends Nancy & Richard from Tamarack Farms in Roseneath, Ontario and tasted their organic maple syrup processed the old-fashioned way in 2021 that we final,y figured out how to make this dessert “Roselle-style”.
They say that it takes a village to raise a child. Perhaps this is also true of creating a delicious dessert at Roselle. It’s a process of collaboration, and of inspiration that comes in fits and starts.
We have been creating desserts at Roselle for 6 years now so we have a much more confident understanding of what we are about, what our style of pastry is, and what our customers will enjoy. Our style is simple and fun and approachable with a focus on seasonal delicacies. We avoid serving you strawberries in winter and dark chocolate in summer.
On that note, ingredients are our second greatest source of inspiration. It makes it much easier to be creative and make delicious desserts when you work with the best ingredients you can find. When it comes to ingredient sourcing, we find the best stuff that we can for you. That’s the not-so-secret secret to great cooking.
(It’s an easy way to know right away if any chef is for real! A great chef will always talk enthusiastically about the quality of their ingredients and how it inspires them. It is impossible to make great food with average ingredients.)
Our focus is more on ingredient excellence than dogmatically sourcing locally. This is a fine balance. For instance, the best vanilla and chocolate comes from sub-Equatorial climates, so that’s always where we get these ingredients from. However, it is impossible to beat locally-grown field strawberries picked fresh the day prior. We support local where possible and leads to the most delicious experience for our customers.
I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain of what we do at Roselle.