Glamorous Penguin

For those of you lucky enough to have grown up with a baker at home, five-layer lemon meringue cakes might be nothing special. For the rest of us, there’s Glamorous Penguin, an oddly named but all-around lovely bakery and café that serves up the kind of cake that could have been homemade (by someone really good at baking, who really loves you, on your birthday). Korean-Canadian owner Sophia Yoo spent months testing recipes with her pastry chef before opening and applies the same rigorous process to new cakes. The vetting process clearly pays off—we can’t get enough of the dense, moist layers of the carrot cake, and the maple apple, and the red velvet, not the mention the oatmeal cookies… Help.