London Bakery Tour
Recently I had a free weekend which for a wedding cake designer in the summer months is a rarity! So, I decided to spend a long weekend in London visiting some family. We took The Original Bus Tour which was a great experience since the hop-on, hop-off tour (also perfect for a whistle-stop bakery tour) had an informative guide and bad jokes and a Thames River Cruise from The London Eye to Tower Bridge. We started at Leicester Square, toured the West End, past Trafalgar Square and The Ritz then out to Hyde Park Corner and past some very thoughtful war memorials and sculptures. We were soon at Buckingham Palace, our 'hop-off' stop and short walk to Belgravia to visit Peggy Porschen Cakes. The shop was as pretty as the pictures I've seen and it was a perfect day to sit on the terrace with cake! We shared a slice of salted caramel cake, the prices made us balk (£4.50 a slice) but the cake was moist, flavourful with a generous filling of salted caramel sauce between the three different cake layers - vanilla, salted caramel and chocolate enrobed with chocolate ganache.
We hopped back on the bus, drove past lots of places including House of Lords, House of Parliament and Big Ben and hopped off at County Hall and headed towards the jetty in front of the London Eye. The skies turned rather grey but it was still a pleasant trip and great to see so many London landmarks from the water and learn a bit more about them too.
We alighted at Tower Bridge and took another bus to the last stop back at Leicester Square. We walked through Convent Garden. We walked past a Lola's Cupcakes but only stopped to photograph the cakes. I'd had cupcakes their before and they were pretty average. We walked through Soho and past Crosstown Doughnuts which was pretty packed but sell great sourdough doughnuts and to our next destination - Hummingbird Bakery. There was so much choice it was hard to decide what to have but we chose a slice of their famous rainbow cake (£5.95). It was huge! There were now 3 of us but we struggled to finish the cake which was good but the buttercream became sickly sweet pretty quick. There was a patisserie-bakery a couple of doors down which was busy and had an impressive window display, I can't remember the name! We were hungry for real food by now and we found Wahaca - a great tapas style Mexican restaurant. The food was exceptional and had a tantalising array of flavours and it was great to try so many different dishes in one sitting. I'd definitely go back there!
The next day we travelled to East London and shopped at Stratford Westfield and mooched around the Olympic Park but not before awesome alcoholic milkshakes at All Star Lanes and a look around the pop up stalls. I was happy to see a Meringue Girls stall - the meringue kisses are way bigger than they look on their Instagram and I chatted with Tobi from Confection Club whilst munching on their brilliant alcoholic macarons! It was Confection Club's first pop up and the guys were doing a great job of promoting their new sweet treats. It was such a fun weekend!
