Sam Lapointe, the co-owner of The Grand Order of Divine Sweets did not come empty-handed to Toronto's Fan Expo. She brought in tow a Sith Lord, a Dark Maul cake carved from a single block of chocolate, horns and all, to be served to Star Wars' own Sam Witwer and the rest of the cast of 'Shadow Lords'.
"We come to Fan Expo every year, and Comic Con, and we love it here," she said. "I like all of the magical shenanigans that we get up to here."
The GOoDS has been a fixture at Fan Expo and Comic Con since 2024, with fans returning year after year to see their favourite characters molded into dessert and visiting the "magical" bakery on Queen Street West that first opened in 2019. The bakery is renowned for its unique displays of pastries and desserts that pull inspiration from nearly every fandom’s universe—star trek, marvel, anime—offering Torontonians the unique physical experience of turning your favourite fictional universes into a delicious and savoury treat.
For Lapointe, the immense power and hold storytelling possesses across generations of fandoms is where the heart of the work lies, as a self-proclaimed geek herself, "From the beginning of time and humans being human, two things have brought people together: stories and food," Lapointe said. "What are fandoms if not stories, and what are great desserts except really fabulous food that brings people together?"
Lapointe trained formally in baking and pastry arts at George Brown College in Toronto and advanced into the Chocolate Academy in Montreal and the Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts. What the schooling did not cover, she filled in over the years, one failed recipe at a time emphasizing that it took many years of intensive self practice to achieve the level of craftsmanship her desserts are known for.
"I am old enough that binge-watching tutorials wasn’t really around when I started," she said. "A lot of this is self-taught, or going to my local library, reading, a lot of trial and error. Since then I have gone through and learned even more in my industry, which has been great. But you can do it if you practice."
Before The GOoDS, Lapointe ran a bakery called Cakes Cove that launched in 2013 at Fan Expo Canada. Due to damage caused by an upstairs unit flooding, she closed that bakery on New Year’s Day 2019. The flood was publicized, and ended up catching the attention of video game veteran Meredith Braun who is known for her work on the popular online video game "Digital Extremes Warframe." Braun herself had been fascinated by the fandom-inspired cake designs and reached out to Lapointe asking if she’d be interested in becoming business partners.
The two worked together to transform Cake Cove’s old space into what is today The GOoDS, with the pair sharing an adamant hope of creating a space for fandoms to join together to share the magic and fun behind fantasy. Today, Lapointe specializes in the baking side while Braun supports the marketing and brand-development to reach diverse fandom communities.
Just three months after the store opened, the COVID19 pandemic would shut the city down. Instead of closing, Braun and Lapointe trudged forward, spending countless nights hand-painting truffles to ship across Canada and into the United States while the storefront took a major hit due to closure. The shop marked its fifth anniversary in December 2024.
Since then, Warner Bros. has taken notice, granting The GOoDS official licensing that lets Lapointe build treats tied to franchises like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and Star Trek. Marking it as the first fresh-food bakery in Canada to hold an official studio licensing. The storefront was even once temporarily transformed into Kowalski Quality Baked Goods, the fictional bakery from the Fantastic Beasts films for a studio promotion.
Beyond that, The GOoDS hosts an annual citywide scavenger hunt each Easter, sending Torontonians chasing clues for a chocolate egg hiding a thousand dollars in cash to the lucky winner: with Lapointe of course designing the chocolate eggs.
As many would guess, the art of pastry making requires a great deal of patience to create such intricate designs, especially for Lapointe, who showed up to this year’s expo with a chocolate Dark Maul, a chocolate Darth Vader, and a "monster" cake topped with tentacles she calls "Sarah," that by no doubt took hours of labour.
"Maul and Vader, they took literal weeks," she said when asked about the process behind her work. "Sometimes it is several days of planning ahead of time before I’ve even touched the food or the chocolate."
For the everyday operations of The GOoDS, Lapointe has created molds of her most popular creations and finds ways to efficiently run a bakery that consistently produces high-quality and affordable treats for fans. "Some creations only take a couple of minutes because I’ve made molds and I’ve made a process to be able to do it really efficiently, so we can sell them and not have to charge too much, while also having really high-end ingredients."
The GOoDS also takes commission cakes for corporate parties and weddings, and Lapointe loves getting a "surprise me" cake offer, where the theme is left entirely up to her.
"We do a lot of custom work for our community," she said. "If you have something to celebrate, we want to help you do it."
All weekend, Lapointe had been posting hour-by-hour updates from the floor on the bakery’s social media page, teasing that her Dark Maul was headed somewhere special.
The reveal came inside a packed panel room, the lights dimmed for the "Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord" panel, when the cake was wheeled out on stage and set in front of Witwer and the rest of the cast, including Gideon Adlon and Vanessa Marshall, who had no idea what was coming. Nearly the entire sculpture was edible chocolate. Lapointe seemed entirely at peace with watching hours of her cake-making labour be devoured by fandom icons.
