It’s easy to get cozily complacent in the bubble that is College Hill, and for good reason — we have pretty much everything we need, from hip/creepy coffee shops to multiple Irish pubs to the GCB. But Blue Room muffins can only satisfy a sweet tooth for so long, and those cake pops at Starbucks are freaking weird. That’s where Pastiche comes in. Tucked away on a back street of Federal Hill, it’s a whole new world from our collegiate haven… Evidently, a world filled with fancy cake.

The chipper yellow awning and blue-trimmed storefront are reminiscent of cafés on the cobblestone streets of quaint European villages. A dining room that seats about 25 is flanked on one side by a working fireplace and mural of the Italian countryside, on the other by dessert crazytown. A big glass display case contains made-in-house cakes, which are sold whole or by the slice; trays and shelves and towers spill with more treats. Welcome to your dream. [Read more →]

Ah, Saint Valentine, thank you for all you have given us. What would we do without red-foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses and poorly written Hallmark cards? Okay okay, I’m not one to be cynical about love and romance, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel a little left out when Starbucks cups and movie night advertisements in the SciLi continuously remind me that I’m (insert cough and awkward eye-contact deflection here) single.

Fortunately for me (and for all of us in college), I cannot complain about the lack of love in my life when my friends and the people I adore most in the world constantly surround me (seriously, I feel like I’m participating in a year-long sleepover with my roommates and I could not be happier). So, to show my roommates how much I love them and how much they mean to me (#sappy), I decided to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a baked treat: red velvet cake. [Read more →]

Some of these cakes are very bad. Some of them are very good. But all of these are more exciting than the flat sheet cakes in the V-Dub.