London Eats: Forget your calorie count and indulge at Western Fair

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Food-loving Western Fair fans are in for a treat this year. A handful new and mouth-watering eats, and drinks to wash it all down, are being served up at the annual tradition, on until Sept. 14. The new items are being sold alongside classic fair snacks ranging from corndogs and cotton candy to poutine and candy apples. Here are four of our picks for those looking to try something new.

NEW YORK-STYLE COOKIES

The cookies at Lumberjacks Bakehouse are crunchy on the outside and soft and gooey at the centre.

And they aren’t small.

Owner Rebecca Billir, who spent plenty of time in her mother’s kitchen growing up in England, is offering more than a dozen varieties of her New York-style cookies, ranging from butter tart and s’mores to Nutella and white chocolate macadamia nut, for between $5 to $7.

But the best seller at the Western Fair has been cookie monster, a blue cookie packed with white chocolate chips and topped with an Oreo.

“We only use high-grade chocolate for all the cookies whether it’s dark, milk or white,” said Billir, who plans to open a brick-and-mortar store in Marsville, southwest of Orangeville, in the spring.

DEEP-FRIED PIZZA

This take on the classic pizza slice arrives in London for the first time after making its debut last year at the CNE in Toronto, where it quickly went viral on social media.

A slice of pizza is coated with crushed Doritos, deep fried, covered in dipping sauce and served on a stick. It comes in several flavours – hot honey, garlic parmesan, sweet and spicy and classic – and costs $11.11.

Customers love the deep-fried pizza, Pizza Pizza manager Mandeep Kaur said.

“They want to try something different,” she said.

DUBAI CHOCOLATE

Sisters Jackie and Tyra Roy aren’t selling your average chocolate bars.

The siblings behind The Sweet Sisters Co. have brought the Dubai chocolate craze to the Western Fair.

Created in 2021 by a Dubai-based dessert chocolatier, the confectionery made of kadayif and a pistachio cream quickly spread around the globe, prompting candy-makers like Lindt to jump on the bandwagon.

“A lot of people ask me what the hype is,” Tyra said. “It’s really good, yeah.”

The hand-made chocolate bars cost $15 for a 160-gram bar and are sold alongside a wide selection of freeze-dried candies, all of them made in a commercial space in Sarnia.

“Once people find out that the filling is pistachio then they understand,” Jackie said of the price of their Dubai chocolate bars.

DIRTY SODA

This colourful drink uses classic pop as a base and adds flavoured syrups, cream and cold foam to top it off.

A cup of the concoction, which comes in nine different flavours including blue cotton candy and red velvet, costs $12 for a 32-ounce cup.

Dirt sodas are relatively new to Canada but have been popular in recent years in the United States. The reality television series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, whose cast members frequently sip on dirty sodas because they don’t don’t drink alcohol, has been credited with helping fuel the trend.