Though diet trends may go up and down with the economy, pastry chefs can always count on one thing - there's always room for dessert.

And as far as the marketplace is concerned, there's more room for dessert than ever in big cities such as Toronto - where a specialty baking and pastry market that emerged in the past three decades has risen into a diversified industry able to satisfy most every sweet tooth.

From classic chocolate tortes to moist mango muffins, Toronto's bakers are carving out niches in both flavour and business segments.

No one who calls themselves a dessert fan in Toronto has escaped the sugary reach of Dufflet Rosenberg, whose Dufflet Pastries launched in 1975 to a wide-open marketplace.

Liz Clayton, Business Edge
Though diet trends may go up and down with the economy, pastry chefs can always count on one thing - there's always room for dessert.

"There was no competition," says Rosenberg of the sweet baked-goods market at the time.

The operation grew from a one-woman show to a mini-empire that now comprises two retail stores, more than 500 wholesale clients and 100 employees.

No longer able to be contained by the small home kitchen in which they originated, Dufflet's signature tarts, cookies and layer cakes are now made in an expansive west-end warehouse.

Rosenberg, like many specialty bakers, feels the secret to her product is in quality ingredients - ingredients the company is proud to boast are all natural.

"I don't think too many companies can make that claim," said Rosenberg. "We don't even use artificial colours and we have no hydrogenated fats either. We've done a complete audit on our ingredients so we can safely make that claim."

Yet, while Dufflet Pastries relies on a diversity of interesting, quality dessert choices, simply offering good food isn't always enough to stay ahead.

According to Agri-Food Canada, advances in cooking and freezing technologies have allowed for the development of better-tasting pre-frozen or par-baked products.

A market for take-home-and-bake or freeze-and-thaw products has flourished across the baking spectrum, from bread-only bakers to dessert purveyors, including Dufflet.

Their Small Indulgences line, launched a few years ago, includes frozen, ready-to-thaw cakes and tarts for those who like to plan ahead. Rosenberg says their frozen cakes, which are available in grocery stores, are a major focus for future expansion.

"There is definitely more and more competition all the time," says Rosenberg, adding, "If you want to grow, I think you have to look outside. And we don't want our quality to suffer, so we don't want to start making any products that are at a lower price point or lower quality."

Another Toronto stronghold of sweets is Phipps Desserts, famous on Eglinton Avenue for its retail café, and across Toronto for the tarts and squares it sells wholesale.

Janet Schreiber and then-partner Kathryn Leinster-Bromell, like Dufflet, started Phipps in 1986 out of a small kitchen.

Schreiber had apprenticed at the Hilton and Leinster-Bromell with Rosenberg herself before starting Phipps. (Leinster-Bromell has since left the Phipps retail fold, but maintains the North York wholesale business and a new cake shop of her own in Toronto's Greektown.)

Schreiber remembers the early days as quite different from those of today's sunny, bustling dessert café.

"There was a lot of opportunity, but it was hard work at the beginning," said Schreiber. "Long, long days and nights, everything was done ourselves from the baking to finishing to deliveries to doing the dishes."

Nowadays, the Phipps line includes not only cakes, tarts and bars, but prepared sandwiches and fresh foods - a full lunch can be had at Schreiber's café, provided one doesn't fill up on dessert first.

Prepared dinners, ready to reheat and go, accompany take-out dessert items that can be bought at nearly any stage of assembly - Phipps usually has raw cookie dough, fresh lemon curd or fudge frosting on hand for those who want to finish a dessert off at home while still cutting out a few time-consuming steps.

Though you can get a fancy layer cake if you want one, Schreiber's staples such as bars, butter tarts and apple cakes tend to stand out for their appeal to comfort and flavour of home-cooking.

"I think it's just real food," says Schreiber about her desserts' unpretentious strength. "It's made with real ingredients, the ingredients you'd find in your kitchen. There's no preservative nonsense - it's just good food, real food - that's why people keep coming back."

In more recent years, many other high-end bakeries have joined the local fray - from French patisseries to pie shops to the latest trend-hoppers - cupcake specialists.

Gourmet cupcake purveyor Babycakes was inspired by bakeries in the United States, where a proliferation of cupcake shops has exploded in recent years.

Though not yet a standalone store, Babycakes is doing a swift business as a subset of Kubo Radio, an upscale Asian-influenced pub in Toronto's up-and-coming Leslieville neighbourhood.

Head chef Mitchell Lipperman is visibly enthused about his cupcake business, which includes such unusual flavours as peanut butter banana, mango and lemon ginger.

The sideline, which is separately branded from Kubo though it relies on the restaurant as a vehicle for its sale and promotion, has done tremendously well since its inception earlier this year.

Cupcakes sell out regularly. Lipperman's red velvet - a mild chocolatey cake, dyed red, with cream cheese frosting - in particular tends to fly out the door, and large custom orders from companies including Holt Renfrew have helped make a name for the bakery.

Like Dufflet and Phipps, Babycakes also does a steady wedding business - cupcakes instead of large cakes are growing in popularity - and also offers distinctly corporate services, such as printing edible logos in exact Pantone colors on thin marshmallow sheeting to go atop cupcake frosting.

But so far, they've hit their stride in the simple niche of just selling cupcakes.

"At the end of the day, the flavours are built naturally and they're different from what other people are doing," says Lipperman, who hopes to see Babycakes outlast the trendiness of cupcakes and emerge into its own storefront in the future.

But for now, his business does remain plagued by one rather sticky problem.

"The one challenge we have is keeping them in stock," laughs Lipperman.

(Liz Clayton can be reached at clayton@businessedge.ca)