Cupcakes -- Montreal style

This past weekend, I went with Jason to Montreal. For the last six years, he's been the "Chandler" to my "Monica" (minus the getting married in the last season thing) as he lives in my building and we bug each other all the time and I steal his TV Guide.

Wait? do you think I'm "Rachel"?

Anyway... He's moving there for the next 10 months because he got a great job there, and I made the drive up with him. Since I had never been to Montreal before, I decided I should do a little research... on cupcakes.

My first attempt was to check out the cupcake blog to see if they had anything listed. They actually had three listed. Two were delivery only -- meaning I'd have to order a dozen or more and have them delivered. The third was a place that had an actual shop... but the website said they would be closed from Sunday, July 25 through some time in August. So I knew that the only way I would be able to sample them was if we could load up all Jason's stuff, drive to Canada, get his working papers at the border, not hit border traffic, and unpack his stuff by 5 pm on Saturday. So...

Next I did a google search, which turned up the same places. Next, I asked Esther for advice and she found me this blog. Not only did it name some other cupcake places, but it told me which ones were the good ones. Plus, they named the neighborhoods, which helped since the only thing I knew about Montreal was the name of Jason's neighborhood. I wrote down the address of the one that is in his neighborhood (which is supposedly marginal), plus the one that won their title of "Best cupcake" two years in a row.

Saturday, we were busy with the moving and the driving, so Sunday evening was the first day we could kind of explore outside of his neighborhood. We decided to go to the "best" place, just so we could locate it. We figured it would be closed by 5:00, as the other one had. When we got there, we discovered that it was, in fact, open until 6 pm (still ridiculously early, if you ask this New Yorker) and the present time was 5:45. However, there was a sign in the window that said that they were sold out. I'll refer you to Esther's blog for my feelings about this. The kicker was that their sign said that they are closed on Monday AND Tuesday. All the time. But this week, they were also closed on Wednesday. Which didn't matter because we left on Tuesday.

On our walk, we happened to walk past the one in his neighborhood and I recognized it right away, but since I thought I could easily go there the following day while J was doing other moving-to-a-foreign-country stuff, we kept walking. The next day, he got done earlier than expected, so we met up and on our way home, got off the subway one stop early to return for cupcakes. Which was when I realized that I wished I had looked at their sign when we were there on Sunday because it also indicated that they are closed on Mondays. And who has Monday as the LAST day in a list of days? What kind of a crazy place is this?!

In addition to that fun stuff, I also wrote down another place that the Canadian food blog recommended... Guess what. CLOSED on Monday!

Desperate for sweets and being denied thrice, we remembered a place in his neighborhood that we had walked by and commented on because it had chocolate in the title... also CLOSED!

So, all of that was to say that I didn't have any cupcakes on this trip.