Bakery Review: Victoria Pastry Company

Victoria Pastry Company - visited March 16, 2019

Last year, I bought season tickets to San Francisco’s musical theater season. I’ve never bought season tickets before as usually, if there’s a particular show I wanted to see, I’d just buy tickets to that individual show and skip the others. But this particular season had several shows I was interested in: Miss Saigon, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Anastasia. Buying season tickets also offered first access for a return performance of Hamilton which I’d already seen but wouldn’t have minded seeing again. So it seemed worth it to splurge on a season ticket.

That is, until I moved out of state after watching only two shows. Oops. Fortunately, I was still working and commuting back to the Bay Area often enough that I could time my return trips to coincide with a couple of the shows I had tickets for. This particular weekend was for Hello, Dolly.

Victoria Pastry was on my list, not only because it was highly rated on “must try” bakery lists published about SF, but because it was walkable from the Powell St BART station. On paper, aka google maps, it’s a 1.2 mile walk. Which isn’t bad; I’ve walked farther in quest of baked goods. There’s just a slight wrinkle that 1.2 miles in San Francisco more than likely means hills. Which it did in this case. But still doable.

It did turn out to be a nice walk with the added bonus of a quad burn going up and down the hills. The bakery itself was small but nicely laid out with its display cases providing a nice selection of individual servings of various cakes, cupcakes, cookies and pastries. 

My standard SOP in trying out a new bakery is to get 2-3 items. It may not be enough to give a fair rating to a bakery but past experience says I can’t load up like I’d like because I’d never finish them in enough time while they were fresh and I don’t want to rate day old stuff, much less consume them. That wouldn’t be fair either.

So for this trip, I went with a red velvet cupcake and a multi-layer slice of chocolate fudge cake. There were several choices for chocolate cake but I went for the straight chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Best to keep things simple.

Both were simple, straightforward desserts which is what I prefer. As usual, I scraped off most of the frosting on the cupcake. If only more bakeries were like Sibby’s and just did a thin covering of frosting but alas, the norm seems to be the puffy frosting tower. No matter, it’s not a big deal to scrape aside. I feel bad for wasting it but I genuinely don’t like (or eat) that much frosting. The cupcake itself was good. Not super red velvet-chocolaty flavor but the texture is better than most of the cupcakes I bake from scratch. 

The chocolate cake slice was rich, moist and definitely very chocolaty. The mousse filling and chocolate ganache topping did me in. The flavors were good but I think I would’ve preferred more cake, less mousse and less topping. It makes for a really rich dessert and moderation is key for maximum enjoyment so I recommend sharing with a friend or three or spacing it out over several sittings.