There's always time for Cake!

I bought "Tea & Cake London" by Zena Alkaya the other day. I'd eyed it up online before but wanted to have a flick through & double check my favourite cake shops were included in the extensive list (because to be quite honest, if they weren't it would be a pretty rubbish cake book!) Peggy Porschen's, Bea's of Bloomsbury & Hummingbird Bakery were all in there so I gave in & bought it, & how happy I am that I did! :)

With my impending post Birthday diet, it probably wasn't the wisest thing to buy as I now feel the need to eat my way around London's best cake shops. But I bought it, & it's mine & who am I to deny that poor little book it's life's purpose?!

So I opened it & started with ...

Konditor & Cook's original Waterloo branch is featured in Tea & Cake London but as we were in the area a friend & I popped into the Soho branch last weekend to kick off my final birthday celebration.
It was located in a random little cinema on Shaftesbury avenue & is open until 11pm (10:30pm on Sundays!) for late night cake emergencies, which I think everyone has once in a while & I'd have a whole lot more if I lived nearby!

We headed straight for the cake. I'd been told by a friend that the Carrot Cake & their renowned Curly Whirly cakes were amazing ... So I went for carrot, & a little mini cake off the counter that was some kind of chocolatey cherry heaven, my friend had the Almond St Clement which was this moist lemony, orangey gluten free almond cake & was delicious - They were all SO good, you definitely could not fault any of them!

To go with our amazingly good cakes we ordered a pot of tea, before noticing my next favourite thing about K&C which is the fact that they sell wine! ... Not enough places sell cake & give you the choice of washing it down with a glass of wine! So after the cake was devoured & the tea was drunk, wine was ordered & we were very happy.

I need to go back & try the Curly Whirly cake ... & the brownies are meant to be super good! There are 6 branches across London, in Soho, Waterloo, Borough Market, Chancery Lane, South Bank & The Gherkin ... all of which I now feel the need to visit! I'd like to go for lunch one day as the savoury food looked super tasty too - I'm really regretting not getting a spinach & parmesan muffin but after all the cake there definitely wasn't room!

So... a good start for my new cake bible! Where to next?!

From across the sea's

As some of you may know I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go and visit my lovely friend Lucy in Singapore earlier this year. She moved out there to work a year ago (lucky thing!) so me & a couple of friends went out to stay for a couple of weeks, with a cheeky trip to Thailand thrown in as a bonus. 

Whilst we were there we discovered something amazing... something which rivalled the view from the pool at the top of Marina Bay Sands, the gorgeous tree lined streets & the dim sum... and it came in the form of a very special sandwich. 

How I wish I didn't love food quite so much... ha! Anyway, I knew I wouldn't be able to do it justice, so as a very special treat today's blog comes all the way from Asia!

My weekend Ritual

It's the little things in life that can make our weekend that little bit more humble and warming. For me, it's a stroll to my local barista coffee house, 'Forty Hands'.

Located in the quaint, nostalgic residential district, Tiong Bahru. Forty Hands is Singapore's best kept secret. Now don't me wrong the coffee is wonderful, but it's not hard to find great coffee in Singapore.... It is in fact the sandwiches that make Forty Hands more than worth the visit.

And so I must tell you about the delight that is the Grilled Mediterranean Lamb Sandwich. Served in a large chunk of toasted freshly baked granary bread, the melted cheese, herby lamb, olives, sun dried tomatoes and onions create a to-die-for combination of delicious Mediterranean flavours. I can honestly say nothing beats the tastiness of this sandwich. It's the perfect hangover cure, pick me up or just general hunger filler!

Sitting on my balcony in the sunshine with one of these bad boys is surely the only way to start a wonderful weekend... There's just one thing missing, my bestest friend Carla to share the enjoyment with :)

Till next time...

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Beautiful Reads

I'm loving Penguin's clothbound classics collection, i'm a sucker for a beautiful book & these are beautiful!  The covers are printed with cute little matt foil illustrations stamped into the cloth cover which relate to each story.

There are 29 classic's to choose from, including Gulliver's Travels, Wuthering Heights & Alice in Wonderland. I LOVE Alice in Wonderland. I just want them all lined up on my bookcase, they're so pretty!

Whilst perusing the clothbound classics I also came across Barnes & Nobels Leatherbound classics... also totally beautiful, especially this edition of Alice in Wonderland (told you I love it)

Peggy Porschen's Scrummy Cakes

Over the past year or so I've developed a bit of a passion for baking and cake decorating and through this I discovered one of my favourite places in London: the Peggy Porschen parlour.

If you haven't heard of Peggy porschen before and you have a sweet tooth or just appreciate amazingly beautiful cakes, her Belgravia parlour would be the first place I'd suggest you visit.

I went with the boyfriend during that ridiculously hot week in October (remember that?! ... That was lovely) and I was so amazingly excited, having drooled over pictures of her cakes for a good 6 months, to actually get to eat one.

After a wander through Belgravia in the blistering sunshine we rounded a corner and I spotted her pretty pink parlour, my boyfriend said I actually squealed and jumped at the sight of it, ever the cool and collected person that I am I just don't believe him, he must have been delirious from the heat.

Spotted this pretty little bird on a pretty Belgravia door.
So cute!

After spending a good 10 minutes choosing what cakes we were going to go with (I chose a slice of the summer berry cake and the boyfriend got a chocolate cupcake) we sat outside and devoured said cakes in what seemed like a couple of seconds, it was literally the best cake I ever tasted! It was light and fluffy and the flavours were amazing, I do think everyone has to go and have at least one of her cakes in their life time, I personally have very over the top dreams of having one of her beautiful tiered cakes centre stage at my wedding one day... maybe if I start saving now! I've also recently discovered that you can go to the parlour for afternoon tea which I will deff be looking into for my birthday next year!

So go... Eat cake and be merry, I've heard the black forest cupcakes are heavenly!