Best of Tucson 1996: Best Bakery For Sweets

Best Bakery For Sweets

Nadine's Pastry Shoppe
4553 E. Broadway

READERS' PICK: Some of the truly amazing cakes at Nadine's taste more like over-sized bon-bons than bona fide cakes, but who's complaining? The chocolate custard-filled Kahlúa cake boasts a thin layer of hard, melted chocolate, which is more than enough to make us swoon. Another of our favorites is the ultramoist chocolate fudge cake with a juicy, raspberry filling. Cakes this special ought to be ordered weeks in advance, but Nadine's carries a ready-made stock for last-minute gourmets. They also have a wide selection of pastries and cookies, including exotic fresh fruit tarts and the popular Russian tea biscuits of layered raspberry, raisin, walnut and cinnamon sugar. If Nadine's homemade fudge doesn't satisfy your sweet tooth, better hook up the IV.

RUNNER-UP AND STAFF PICK: The days of longingly gazing in the window and wistfully passing by the bakery are gone. Even the most health conscious can walk into Grossman's Bake Shop, 3140 E. Fort Lowell Road, guilt-free. Here you'll find a mouth-watering selection of fat-free cakes, brownies and muffins. The enormous muffins--even the sinfully delicious Chocolate Decadence--are also sugar-free, though we're partial to the Russian coffee cake and cranberry varieties. After sampling the chewy chocolate fudge brownies, our belief begins to waver. Fat-free? Can it be true? As true as Bob Dole's defense of the tobacco leaf? Devil's food layer cake with chocolate icing, New York cheesecake...Have we died and gone to heaven?

A PERFECT 10: The counter staff gestures at a rack of cooling orbs when asked, "Why are they called vegetable donuts?" but cannot explain the true meaning of the term. Thus begins the deep, subterranean mystery of Le Cave Vegetable Do-Nuts, 1219 S. Sixth Ave., a brightly-lit, well stocked bakery on the busy intersection of Sixth Avenue and 22nd Street. Cakes, hot pink cookies, and racks of fresh, sweet donuts have awaited the hungry shopper there since 1935. Rumor has it the "vegetable" appellation refers to the kind of oil in which the donuts (delicate versions of the honey-glazed variety) are cooked, but we prefer to think of it as a veiled reference to secret ingredients that play havoc with the structure of the food pyramid, creating a whole new category: the vegetable donut.