tea and cake london

I saw this book at Waterstone's a couple of weeks ago and decided I HAD TO HAVE IT. It has a long list of tearooms, cafes, bakeries, and patisseries where one can enjoy the sweet of London. I was positively drooling over it in the bookstore, and the moment I brought it home Ari and I decided to have tea and cake Fridays here in London and go to as many of these little places as possible. So I'll share with you a few of our finds!

I have to preface this by saying that I'm obviously not a food photographer, so you'll just have to assume that the food looks about ten times as good as it does in the picture. Okay, this first photo is a slice of lemon loaf and a walnut brownie from the Hummingbird Bakery. The brownie was marvelously chocolatey, rich, and speckled with walnuts––that was my first pick, of course. The lemon loaf, though, was surprisingly delicious. I'm not usually one to go straight for lemon-flavored sweets (sometimes they can just be too sweet), but this lemon bread was delightful. They also had some beautifully-decorated cupcakes that looked fantastic. I'll have to remember that if there's a round two.

This slice of heaven was from Peggy Porschen. This is the Glorious Victoria layer cake, which is vanilla bean cake with a layer of vanilla bean buttercream and a layer of raspberry jam. It was really, really good, and wasn't too sweet, despite what it might sound like. This is a trend I've been noticing––so far, the desserts here in London have been less sweet than desserts in the States. I really like it. I think Americans get a little crazy with the sugar, but Brits seem to show a little more restraint in that regard. Oh, and Ari got the hot chocolate, which was exceptionally frothy. 

This past week we went to Lanka and got hot chocolate, a flapjack, and a white chocolate raspberry mousse cake. I'll load the pictures later, but let me just say that the hot chocolate was SUPERB. So far, the best hot chocolate I've had here has been from Lanka and Caffe Nero. The flapjack was a sort of glorified granola bar, and it was okay, but not my favorite. The whitechocolateraspberrymoussecake was absolutely to die for. Seriously, it was amazing.

I'm going to have to get creative on my food adjectives here, as you can tell.

That's all for now!