Cakes and Pastries for Office Events

Ordering for an office is a different problem from ordering for a party, and most of the difference comes down to one thing. Nobody serves anything. There is no host with a knife, no plates, and no moment when everybody sits down. Food appears on a table and is eaten standing up over several hours by people who are mostly on their way somewhere else.

That changes what you should order.

Individual things beat a cake

A whole cake on an office table needs somebody to cut it, and that person needs a knife, a serving slice and somewhere to put the slices. In practice one brave person cuts four slices, the rest of the cake sits there looking mauled, and by three o'clock it has dried at the cut face and nobody wants it.

Things that come in pieces solve all of this. Nobody has to commit to being the one who starts it, portions are equal without anyone judging, and the last one looks the same as the first.

The obvious choices are the cookies, at £18 a box in chocolate, marshmallow, raspberry and pistachio, or popcorn and caramel. Six cinnamon rolls at £44. Six lemon tartlets at £30. Choux buns in sixes, nines or twelves from £16. Six apple hand pies at £22.

If you do want a cake, the ones that survive being cut and left are the Prague, the carrot cake and the Napoleon. All three are firm enough to hold a cut edge for a few hours. The pavlova, the strawberry cake and anything with fresh cream will not, and they should not go anywhere near an all day table.

How much to order

The honest ratio for an office is well below one item per head.

For a team of twenty with something else happening, allow twelve to fifteen pieces. For a team of twenty where this is the whole event, allow twenty five to thirty, because people take two. For an all day table where things are replenished, count on roughly one and a half pieces per person across the day.

Variety matters more than volume. Three boxes of three different cookies goes further than five boxes of the same one, because people take a second of something different and stop after one of something identical.

Savoury changes the maths entirely. Pirozhki at £22 to £27 for six are substantial enough that two make a lunch, so for a lunchtime meeting they replace a sandwich order rather than sitting alongside it. Mushroom, potato and onion, cabbage and egg, onion and egg, meat and cabbage, or liver.

The dietary question, handled properly

The standard office approach is a separate small box marked with somebody's name, which is well meant and slightly grim for the person receiving it.

There are better options. The Esterházy is gluten free because it is made from almonds and egg white with no flour in the recipe, so it goes on the main table and nobody identifies it as the free from option. The pavlova is the same, though it does not last a morning. The Florentines are flour free, keep well and sit happily in a mixed selection.

For vegetarians, the mushroom pirozhki are the one with real savoury weight to them, and they are the filling that most often converts people who were not sure about pirozhki at all.

Full allergen information is on every product page. If you are ordering for a group with several requirements, it is quicker to send us the list and let us tell you what works than to cross reference fifteen pages.

Timing and delivery

We need 48 hours, which for an office order usually means placing it at the start of the week for the end of it. Bread needs 72 hours and is baked on Wednesdays only, so it rarely fits an office schedule.

Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 everywhere else we cover, which is all London postcodes plus a good deal of Surrey, Kent and the Home Counties. The City, Canary Wharf, Shoreditch, Clerkenwell, Victoria, Mayfair and the West End are all standard.

Two practical points. Deliver the day before if the event is early, because a nine o'clock start and a delivery window on the same morning is a needless risk, and almost everything is fine overnight in a fridge or a cool room. And give us a name and a mobile number for reception, because a building with a security desk will not accept a box addressed to a company alone.

There is a £50 minimum order, which most office orders clear without trying.

What to order for what

For a client meeting where the food is meant to signal effort, the choux with Madagascan vanilla cream, or the lemon tartlets. Both look considered and neither requires cutlery.

For a team celebration, a Prague or a carrot cake with a box of cookies alongside, so there is something for the people who do not want to queue for a slice.

For an all day workshop, cookies and Florentines, because they are the only things that are as good at four o'clock as they were at nine.

For a lunch, pirozhki across two or three fillings, plus something sweet and small to follow.

For a leaving do, the medovik. It is the cake people ask about, which gives a room something to talk about other than the person leaving.

The thing offices get wrong most often

Ordering too much of one item and nothing else.

Twenty of the same cinnamon roll for a team of twenty sounds correct and is not. People take one, and then the table looks picked over rather than plentiful for the rest of the day. Three or four different things in smaller quantities looks better at every hour, encourages a second visit, and covers the fact that a fifth of any office does not eat sweet things at eleven in the morning.

The other frequent error is forgetting that a meeting room table has no fridge. Anything with fresh cream on it has a working life of about two hours in a warm room. Order those only if they are being eaten at a fixed time.

Ordering

Everything goes through the website with a delivery date at least two days ahead. For recurring orders, or for anything above about forty people, send us a message. Regular office deliveries are easier to plan on both sides once we know roughly what you need and when.