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Xococava

1560 Yonge St., Toronto. 416-979-9916. Desserts from $0.50 to $6.50.

Chris McDonald hates me. I think it's because I once wrote that he tries a bit too hard at his culinary badass thing. He was making Florentine tripe for a street food festival outside Toronto City Hall. Mmm, boiled stomach lining, I said. Way to bring the crowds running. Anyway, now he looks right through me like I'm not there. If I say, "Hi, Chris, you're looking fine today in your cycling tights," for instance, it's as though he doesn't see me.

I was kind of at peace with this because Chris McDonald doesn't even like dessert. The first time I went to Cava, his tapas place uptown on Yonge Street, he asked me what I thought of the place (this was back when he merely wasn't fond of me), so I told him I liked it except for the dessert, which wasn't good at all. He looked at me and sort of smiled and said, "Yeah, well, it's dessert. I've never been much for dessert."

Xococava, MacDonald's latest Spanish-inspired venture, opened earlier this summer next door to Cava. It's a dessert place. Maybe there's hope for our relationship yet.

Pronounced "choco-cava," Xococava is a little sliver of a room with an ice cream freezer and a takeaway counter and a window up front where McDonald's pastry people make chocolate truffles and ice cream during the day.

There's no seating here, though you can perch at the little counter that runs along the side of the shop, under the "tile" made from broken china. But Xococava is meant to be casual. The little pastries and house-made marshmallows and ice creams and truffles (25 kinds) that they make here are designed for strolling.

The croissants are good. Not quite Paris-bakery good (they're neither flaky enough or buttery enough or warm enough to pass that test), but Toronto-bakery good, with crisp, rich, well-developed exteriors and slightly bready insides.

The churros, fried dough batons with star anise and cinnamon-sugar spicing, are also good, though they'd be better if served hot out of the oil.

But the ice cream and the chocolates are clearly the stand-outs. McDonald's prune and sherry ice cream, made with Pedro Ximénez, takes luxurious depth from the prunes and a balancing touch of sourness from the booze. "Hokey Pokey" is made with burned sponge toffee; like many of the flavours here, it's more of an adult taste than one for kids.

McDonald bought his ice cream equipment from Hart Melvin, the man behind Gelato Fresco, and he's taken plenty of pointers from Melvin, too. That especially shows in his Ontario strawberry ice cream. I've never had better strawberry gelato than the stuff that Gelato Fresco makes. McDonald's ice cream runs a close second. His custard is stripped down and light and just rich enough to complement the chunks of berry. And McDonald's strawberry ice cream tastes like strawberries - no small feat at most other places.

Xococava's chocolate truffles come in various flavours, from tried-and-trues like mint, raspberry or gianduja to more exotic takes like chorizo. Charcuterie and chocolate? It works better than you'd think. Venison and cocoa are a classic combination, after all. (Nathan Isberg, at Coca, has plied that combination beautifully in the past few years).

And out on the West Coast, Vancouver pastry masters Dominique and Cindy Duby have made fans of some of the world's best chefs by pioneering new (and laborious) ways of combining savoury and sweet.

Xococava's chorizo truffles combine the tastes of dark Callebaut chocolate, sweet pork fat and toasted chilis. You wouldn't want to eat five of them, but one or two are glorious.

Milk chocolate and cedar is way better than it sounds - it tastes like a walk through a chocolate forest (though SOMA, the city's reigning chocolate masters, have been making tree-flavoured chocolates - and better ones at that - for a while). Other flavours don't always work so well. Black olive enrobed in white chocolate, for instance, tastes like soap. But then white chocolate and nearly anything tastes like soap.

Just as we're leaving, a sugar freak I'm with spies the bags of house-made marshmallows near the espresso machine on the counter. It's the last thing we need, laden down as we are with armloads of ice cream and pastries and chocolates. But we try the marshmallows anyway. They're an unexpected treat. They're sweet and light and sticky like a fluffernutter sandwich, but here they're pink and flavoured with red currants, a trick to the tongue that makes them taste almost wholesome.

Is this a softer side to Chris McDonald? There's nothing badass, after all, about pink marshmallows made with berries.

And then the glucose rush kicks in.

Special to The Globe and Mail