Tuesday, 04 August 2009

One of the core ideas behind the shop, was that it would bring back what's long been missing in London--a neighbourhood bakery where you can build years of tradition using our cakes. It's what I had growing up in Washington D.C.--a bakery called Tivoli's --an Italian-style bakery next to Rosselyn Tube Station where my mother and I would commute to work every morning when I was little and had summer school break. And on an occassional summer afternoon, my treat was a rectangular slice of this white chocolate mousse cake: 3 layers of white genoise, white chocolate bavarois cream, and covered in white chocolate shavings. On my birthdays, my family would get a whole one, with my name written on a cute chocolate disc.

Now that we have passed our first wedding season, we are now getting requests for the Anniversary cakes, done in the same flavour as on their wedding day. It's great to be a part of their tradition and I'm quite excited to continue that in years to come.

It's also great that at the same time, we're still upholding our coffee reputation as well! We continue to be on TimeOut's list of best coffee shops in London, and we have no intention of leaving it anytime soon. We not just love coffee--we respect it. For coffee drinkers, it is an important part of life--it's what helps get us through the day, and it's something to be thoroughly enjoyed, not just tolerated.

We're still also known for our afternoon tea, and we are slowly learning how to incorporate that in our shop's rhythm. I can say with absolute certainty that the entire group of us had any clue how popular afternoon tea could be! We instituted a reservation system so we could have an idea of how many people we could expect, but in the meantime, we were also losing our shop's identity as the neighbourhood spot. We have put in a few measures to hopefully strike the right balance, as we'd love to have everyone experience sitting in at least once!

-b