Peddle on down the block and GetYourSweetFix
Does inspiration find you, or do you find it? How easy it for you to get inspired? Is it a long, gruelling process to come up with something out of nothing? Or is there something within you that constantly looks for it, and can translate everything around you into a fantastic, new and creative idea. The physics, science and magic of inspiration can be a mystery that you manage to solve, or it can be a riddle that you form yourself.
For Sarah Farmer (pastry chef at Fauna restaurant), it is the latter. Sarah gives me a sneak peak into her brain where Getyoursweetfix exists and where Getyoursweetfix creates. Don’t expect your typical panacotta when you listen to her talk about her dessert plans for the week. Care for a deconstructed black forest cake? How? What? Huh? This is what exists outside of our known flavour universe, and she is who will take us there.
Her concept is simple and ever-changing
“Well the concept is for people to get their sweet fix. I want to be fun and innovative. I’m very anti set menu” she says with conviction. “New stuff all the time, keeping it fresh to death”. I got really giddy right around this point and wanted to smack the table like HELL YES.
She tells me about where it all started
“High School wasn’t my thing and that’s how I found my love of pastries. Amongst the gardens and kitchen space at Rideau Hall where I did my co-op placement. My last day at Rideau Hall, the head chef Louis Charest, called me into his office to ask what my plans for the summer were. I said, maybe work at the cinema near my house. He said hold on and got in touch with the NAC’s Kurt Waddell and told him he had a girl who was very promising”. He wanted Kurt to take her under his wing. She promptly showed up the next day and started work as a cook at one of Ottawa’s top food establishments.
What she’s all about
“I live and breathe pastries”. One of her first pastries ever was a chocolate chip cookie she made with her mom. Most recently, according to her latest Instagram update, evidence of heaven in only this part of the world exists with her Black Forest Cake mix, which is a bowl filled with Chocolate Cake, vanilla bean frozen custard, olive oil powder, sugar glass, sour cherry sour cream and sour cherry bites. There is also Exhibit B; Angel food cake with grapefruit curd, blood orange semi freddo, citrus, rose hip gin gel and sugared macadamia nuts. Who would have thought? Well you have an answer for that now.
On her master control over taste buds
“I have a cooking background, so I have the ability to take control of the ingredients I’m working with and not necessarily be confined by the science that goes into just baking things. Being spontaneous and using weird ingredients, adding a little extra salt, using lemon zest, little things here and there to balance the taste buds”.
Her favourite place to ride her bike to and have a picnic
“I bike to Westboro beach and just setup next to the water with some charcuterie in my basket”. As you can probably imagine, the bike ride from Centertown to Westboro beach is the perfect backdrop and a metaphor for where things are headed for Sarah, uphill.
Where you can head with your bike to fill your basket with GetYourSweetFix pastries and desserts in town
A location is in the works. That is all we know for now. Stay tuned!
I hope that gives you enough of a hit to understand and appreciate what we’re in for in this city with Sarah and Getyoursweetfix. It isn’t the inevitable last stretch of the menu that strikes a dreadful pang in your soul when ‘may I interest you in dessert?’ is asked. Getyoursweetfix is the next act, a new beginning, a reset. It’s where the cellos and violas start to playfully chime in after the dramatic bass-riden movements of the orchestra have subsided.
Photos by Zara
