When Pina Malfara first envisioned what her bakery would look like, she imagined a space similar to her kitchen at home. “I wanted people in the neighbourhood to feel like they walked into their own kitchen,” she says, “as if their mother or grandmother was baking in the back.”
She turned her vision into a reality with Sweet Serendipity Bake Shop, her bakery on the strip of the Danforth just a minute’s walk away from Greenwood subway station. In the time since it opened in April 2014, Sweet Serendipity has become a neighbourhood staple with a set of loyal regulars. It has the warmth of a family kitchen, with its exposed brick walls and treat jars filled with fresh cookies and biscotti on top of the display cases — and with Pina baking in the back and her employee Stacey Redhead taking care of customers out front.
Pina says she tries to offer a product with a homemade feel and made from scratch, instead of something with more decorative value than flavour. “I don’t try to be fancy,” she says, adding that her baked goods “don’t look fancy but they taste great.”
