Faye Kaplan has found a sweet way to cheer on the Sens.
The owner of Hintonburg’s The Cake Shop and diehard hockey fan has a new addition to her lineup of Sens cupcakes and cookies: the Hamburglar cake.
“My daughter Nadine and I were at the game when people started throwing hamburgers on the ice,” says Kaplan, 69. “It was during that crazy ride when Hammond basically dragged us into a playoff position. We started thinking, we could make a Hamburglar cake.”
They debuted the masked cake a couple of weeks ago and say they’ve lost count of how many they’ve sold since.
“I can’t even tell you — it’s been dozens,” says Kaplan. “People come in to get their picture taken with one of the cakes. We have 17 ordered for this weekend, but it’s really just starting, people are just getting into play-off parties. My girls work like machines and they aren’t even hockey fans.”
Kaplan says it wasn’t hard to come up with the Hamburglar cake because they already made a hamburger-shaped cake with the SpongeBob SquarePants animated character on top. “We basically just took SpongeBob off and added the mask, made of fondant icing.”
The $42 six-inch (15-cm) domed cakes are usually made with marble cake, with vanilla icing airbrushed to look like a brown burger bun, a thick circle of fudge icing for the meat, and more coloured icing to look like ketchup, mustard, relish and lettuce.
The Cake Shop operators have been making Senators cookies for the past 12 years.
Making sweet treats to celebrate the Sens isn’t new for Kaplan and her daughter, Nadine Hecht, 42. Twelve years ago, when their bakery was on Greenbank Road, they came up with the idea of making cookies shaped like Sens’ jerseys and decorated with each player’s name and number.
“We stayed up literally all night, just the two of us, baking. In the morning, there’d be a line-up at the door, with people holding little lists of which ones they wanted. We made thousands and it’s just got crazier every year.”
Those cookies sell for $3.50 each, with 50 cents from each going to the Ottawa Senators Foundation.
“They’re so labour-intensive, we don’t make a lot of money on the cookies,” says Kaplan. “They’re basically a labour of love.”
A season ticket holder, Kaplan says that when she attends games at the Canadian Tire Centre, she stuffs her pockets with the cookies and passes them out to children.
The most popular cookies this season?
“Stone, Hammond and Karlsson, of course, because he’s the captain,” says Kaplan. “And Pageau — he’s very popular now because he’s the one who scored the hat trick (against the Montreal Canadiens in 2013).”
Kaplan says the saddest thing for her is when a player is traded.
“I take the ribbon off the cookie and just drop it in garbage.”
