Mona Prasad was travelling the world, working for a biotech company when she decided it was time to take a sabbatical.
She ended up in Paris at École Lenôtre where she spent a year training as a pastry chef.
And when she returned home, the latent dream of opening a bakery surfaced.
Up until then, baking was simply a hobby she developed with the help of a course at Toronto’s George Brown College.
She tried working at a few shops and when the pandemic hit, she started baking for friends.
On Nov. 26, 2022, she opened Paris Calling Pastry in Aurora.
“Our key mandate is to make everything in house,” she declares.
That runs the range of cakes, croissants, pain au chocolat, fillings, caramel in lattes and hot chocolate using quality ingredients and the technique she learned in France.
If there are holidays, she quickly learned, it’s pastry season. The shop’s busiest times are in the fall when Thanksgiving nears, followed by Christmas.
Then there’s Valentine’s Day, Easter and Mother’s Day. Often a box of pastries is presented as a gift to mark an occasion.
Summer is the slower period.
While Prasad does the baking, she has three or four staff who help with production, her mom helps with the front of the house, where there are a handful of tables where guests can enjoy coffee or tea with their treats.
She also caters, setting up dessert tables for special events like baby showers.
Everything is custom-made, so she’ll fill fresh sandwich orders for office meetings and other gatherings, as well.
Where she draws the line is wedding cakes.
“I like things that look good, my philosophy is that it has to also taste good,” she explains.
Instead of the traditional three-layer cake with a fondant exterior used primarily for designing, Prasad will create a croquembouche or croque-en-bouche, which is a French dessert made of choux pastry puffs assembled in what she describes as a tower. They can contain flavoured cream and have a caramel exterior. Guests are encouraged to pluck the puffs from the tower.
Or, if requested to do a wedding cake, she’ll do a entremet or mousse cake with three layers, each on their own stand.
Prasad was purposeful on the location, deciding that she would set up shop in either Aurora or St. Catharines. She wanted a place with a close community feel and one without a French patisserie. She also wanted minimum delays in opening so she kept an eye out for a location with a kitchen in a neighbourhood that didn’t have anything like what she wanted to develop
“I was looking at towns with potential for future growth in terms of population,” she explains.
She found what she was looking for in an Aurora location formerly occupied by a Persian bakery that had an oven she could use along with some display cases.
She did do some redesigning, painting and added some wainscotting at the front. The major investment was for the equipment in the back, like mixers and freezers.
In one and a half months she was open, making croissants from scratch and hand cutting macron shells. The beauty about the custom approach, she said, is she can match an individual’s preference to the finished product, which might include half-sized croissants, for instance.
“The community has been very welcoming,” she says, attributing the shop’s success to word of mouth. That word includes the claim that Paris Calling has "the best croissants in York Region."
It’s also become the go-to place, she adds, for people in search of a sweet gift.
While Prasad is happy with the business, she already envisions a next stage. She expects to soon fill a demand for baking demonstrations, teaching French baking techniques – something she started doing earlier this year. She might also add some Indian cooking demonstrations.
Paris Calling Pastry is at 15531 Yonge St, south of St. John's Sideroad, in Aurora.
