Dessert Delivery for Special Occasions

Sending a dessert is a way of saying something without having to write it down, which is why the choice matters more than it appears to. A cake that is wrong for the occasion is not neutral. It reads as not having thought about it.

Here is what suits what.

A dinner party

The dessert arrives after two or three courses, when people are already full, and its job is to finish the meal rather than to be the meal.

Go light. The pavlova at £72 is the best answer we have. Crisp meringue shell, soft marshmallow centre, cream and fresh berries, and it is the least heavy thing we make. It is also flour free, which quietly covers a guest you may not have been told about.

The lemon meringue tart at £40 does a related job differently. The curd is sharp and after a rich meal that sharpness is exactly right in a way that no amount of chocolate is.

Avoid buttercream after a long dinner. The Kyiv and the Esterházy are excellent cakes and they will be admired and left on the plate.

An anniversary

The consideration here is that two people have to eat it, possibly over several days.

That rules out anything with fresh cream or fresh fruit, which are finished within a day or so. It points towards the Napoleon at £85, which holds for three days in the fridge and does not decline, or the Prague at £75, which is similar.

The Cipriani at £98 is the one to send for a significant anniversary. It is vanilla sponge and a very light cream with nothing to hide behind, and it is the cake we would send if we wanted somebody to understand that we had taken it seriously.

A birthday, sent rather than carried

If you cannot be there, the cake is standing in for you, so it should be legible from across a room.

The Bird's Milk at £78 is the one. Dark chocolate shell over a set soufflé layer, and it looks like an object rather than a cake. It photographs well, which matters, because the person receiving it will send you a picture and that picture is the thank you.

Add candles at checkout. A cake without candles arriving on a birthday looks like a cake that was ordered in a hurry.

Condolences

The instinct is to send flowers. Food is often better, because a household in the middle of a bereavement has people arriving and nothing to give them.

Send savoury and send plenty. Pirozhki across two or three fillings, at £22 to £27 for six, are the right shape for this. They keep, they reheat, they can be handed to a visitor without anyone having to cook, and they do not require the household to perform gratitude at a table.

If you want to send something sweet, the goose feet cookies at £25 or the oat cookies at £20 last a week in a tin and can sit on a counter being available to whoever wants them.

Do not send a decorated celebration cake. It is a well meant thing that lands wrongly.

An apology

Small, good and not extravagant. An extravagant apology reads as buying your way out.

The chocolate truffles at £48 for twenty, or the choux at £16 for six. Something that says you thought about it rather than something that says you spent money on it.

A thank you to a household with children

The Charodeyka at £50. Sponge, custard cream, chocolate glaze, nothing to explain and nothing that requires anybody to be adventurous at short notice.

Or the cinnamon rolls at £44 for six, which get eaten at breakfast and make a house smell right for an hour.

Someone who is homesick

This is the one we get most often and the one that matters most.

If they are Russian, Ukrainian, Polish or Baltic, the cakes are not the answer. Send the pastries. Oreshki at £40 for twenty, sochniki at £25 for six, kartoshka at £24, trubochki at £31 for five.

These are the things people cannot get here, and they carry a great deal more weight than a cake does. Almost every order of oreshki we send has a note attached about somebody's grandmother. If you know which one they grew up with, send that one specifically.

Practical things about sending

We need 48 hours. Same day is not possible and next day is often not either, so a gift dessert takes a small amount of planning.

Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 elsewhere, covering all London postcodes and much of Surrey, Kent and the Home Counties.

There is a £50 minimum order. For a small gift this usually means adding a box of cookies or chocolates to reach it, which is no bad thing.

Somebody has to be in. These are not things that can be left on a doorstep in July. Send us the recipient's mobile number so the delivery can be arranged with them rather than guessed at.

Say who it is from. More gift deliveries than you would believe arrive with no indication of the sender, and the recipient spends the afternoon working it out.

A word on the note

The message field at checkout is the most underused thing on the site. A cake arriving with no words attached is a nice object. A cake arriving with two sentences on it is a gesture.

It does not need to be long or clever. The best ones we have sent out have been about six words. What you want to avoid is the blank card, which happens more often than it should because people leave the field to the end and then cannot think of anything, so they leave it.

Write it before you get to the checkout and paste it in.

Esterházy Cake£76Vanilla Meringue Cake£102

The general rule

Match the weight of the gift to the weight of the occasion, and match the food to what the household can actually do with it. A £98 cake sent to two people who are grieving is not generous, it is a problem they now have to solve. Six boxes of pirozhki sent to the same household is thoughtful.

Nearly every mistake in sending food is a failure to picture what happens after the box is opened.