Cakes and Pastries for Family Gatherings

A family gathering is the hardest room to buy food for. A birthday party has one age group. A dinner party has adults who have chosen to be there. A family lunch has a four year old, a fifteen year old, four people in their forties and somebody's grandmother, and they want genuinely different things.

Ordering for the middle of that range pleases nobody. Here is how to cover it properly.

What children actually eat

Not what you think, and not what they say.

Children are conservative about texture and adventurous about very little. What works is soft, sweet, familiar and requiring no explanation. What does not work is anything with an unfamiliar sourness, anything with visible fruit they did not expect, and anything they have to be told about first.

The Charodeyka at £50 is the answer. Sponge, custard cream, chocolate glaze, nothing to explain. It is also our cheapest cake, and children are entirely uninterested in provenance.

The strawberry cream cake at £65 is the other one they eat without negotiation, because it tastes of fruit and cream rather than of sugar.

Among the small things, the Ferrero style oreshki at £40 win over the classic dulce de leche ones almost every time. Cinnamon rolls at £44 disappear. Apple hand pies at £22 for six are useful because they are portable and a child can walk off with one.

What children reliably leave: anything with nuts through it, the lemon tart, the rye bread, the liver pirozhki, and anything where they can see something green.

What the oldest generation asks for

If your family came from Russia, Ukraine, Poland or the Baltics, this is where the ordering actually matters, and it is not the cake.

It is the pastries. Oreshki at £40 for twenty. Sochniki at £25 for six. Trubochki at £31 for five. Kartoshka at £24. Goose feet at £25. These are the things that are not available here, and putting them on a table has an effect that no cake achieves.

The reaction is usually quiet and out of proportion. Somebody picks one up and says they have not seen these since they were a child, and then the afternoon goes somewhere it was not going to go.

If you know which one their family made, order that specifically. It is worth asking a sibling before you order rather than guessing.

The middle, which is easiest

Adults in the middle of the range are the least demanding and the most likely to say they do not mind, which is unhelpful.

The medovik at £68 is the safe centre of any family table. It is the most reliably liked thing we make, it is not too sweet, and it is unusual enough to be worth talking about without being difficult.

The carrot cake at £65 is the other reliable one, and it is the cake that people who claim not to like cake will still eat.

The savoury problem

Family gatherings run long, and at some point people want something that is not sweet. A table of nothing but cake becomes tiring after an hour.

Pirozhki solve this. Potato and onion at £22 for six is the one children eat. Cabbage and egg at £22 is the traditional one. Mushroom at £27 covers vegetarians with something substantial. Meat and cabbage at £27 is the one adults go back to.

Two fillings for a family of ten is enough. Warm them for ten minutes in the oven before people arrive, not in the microwave.

A worked order

Twelve people across three generations, a Sunday afternoon.

One medovik at £68 as the centre. One Charodeyka at £50 for the children, which also gives the adults a second option. Six sochniki at £25 and twenty oreshki at £40 for the grandparents. Six potato pirozhki at £22 and six cabbage and egg at £22 for the savoury.

That comes to £227 before delivery, it will not run out, and every age group at that table has something that was clearly chosen with them in mind.

If that is more than you want to spend, drop the second cake. One medovik, the pastries and the pirozhki comes to £177 and still covers everybody.

Practical things

Order for the day before. Every cake here is fine after a night in the fridge and the medovik is better for it. Nobody wants to be waiting for a delivery while relatives arrive.

Check fridge space before the box arrives, not while people are in the kitchen.

Take the cakes out twenty minutes before cutting. Cold flattens flavour and it is most noticeable in the medovik and the Charodeyka.

Cut smaller slices than you think. At a family gathering with several things on the table, people want a taste of two cakes rather than a full slice of one. An 18 cm cake cut into sixteen goes further and pleases more people than the same cake cut into ten.

Ask about allergies now. In a large family there is usually at least one, and it is much easier to order the Esterházy at £75 as the gluten free cake for everybody than to sort it out on the day.

The teenagers

Easy to forget, and the one group that gets nothing chosen for them.

They will not eat the children's cake, because it is for children, and they are frequently indifferent to the pastries their grandparents are moved by. What they do eat is anything that can be picked up without a plate and without joining a queue.

Cookies at £18 a box, the cinnamon rolls, the choux, the apple hand pies. Put those somewhere separate from the main table and they will vanish.

It is also the age at which somebody starts announcing a new dietary position. The Esterházy at £75 covers gluten, and the mushroom pirozhki at £27 cover a recent conversion to vegetarianism with something substantial rather than apologetic.

Bird's Milk Cakefrom £78Prague Cake (18cm)£82

Ordering

Everything needs 48 hours notice, so a Sunday gathering means ordering on Thursday at the latest.

Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 across the rest of London and Surrey, with a £50 minimum on orders, which a family order clears without effort.