Seasonal Cakes and Desserts

If you looked for the strawberry cake in February you would not have found it. In August it is there. This confuses people who assume a website lists everything a bakery can make, and it is worth explaining, because the alternative is worse.

Why things disappear

A strawberry and cream cake is vanilla sponge, whipped cream and strawberries. That is the entire recipe. There is no jam, no glaze and nothing else in it.

Which means the cake is the fruit. Made with good strawberries in June it is one of the best things we do. Made with pale, watery, imported strawberries in February it is a £65 disappointment, and no amount of technique rescues it, because there is nothing to hide behind.

We could make it anyway. Plenty of places do, and the customer generally does not complain, they just quietly do not order again.

So instead it comes off the site. The listing disappears, and it comes back when the fruit is worth eating. The decision is made by tasting rather than by a date in a calendar, which is why the exact timing shifts from year to year.

The same applies to the strawberry tart at £51 and to the gluten free peach pie at £46.

What is always there

The great majority of the range does not move at all.

The Eastern European cakes are made from things that are the same in January and July. Medovik at £68 is honey, flour, egg, soda, butter and soured cream. Napoleon at £85 is pastry and custard. Kyiv, Prague, Bird's Milk, Esterházy, Charodeyka, the Cipriani. None of them depend on a season.

That is not an accident. These recipes come from places with long winters and were developed to be makeable when fresh produce was not available, which is exactly why they became the standard cakes across the region.

The pastries are the same. Oreshki, sochniki, trubochki, kartoshka, goose feet, kurabye. Store cupboard baking, available all year.

Pirozhki, all six fillings, are unaffected. Bread is Wednesdays, every week, all year.

What suits when

Beyond what is available, there is what is worth ordering, which is a different question.

Spring. The lighter things start making sense again. The pavlova at £72, the lemon meringue tart at £40, the meringue roll at £45. Easter matters a great deal in Russian and Ukrainian households and we get asked for paskha and kulich, which we do not currently make, though it comes up every year.

Summer. The strawberry cake and the strawberry tart while they last. The pavlova, which is the best hot weather dessert we make. Avoid buttercream entirely in a warm room, so no Kyiv and no Esterházy at a July garden party. The Basque cheesecake at £60 is good in summer because it is served at room temperature rather than cold.

Autumn. The apple pie at £40 comes into its own. The carrot cake at £65 makes more sense as the weather turns. Pirozhki start selling noticeably better, particularly potato and onion, which are cold weather food.

Winter. The rich cakes. Prague, Kyiv, Napoleon, Bird's Milk. Kartoshka at £24, which is dense and very sweet and suits a dark afternoon. Oreshki at £40, which is what a great many people associate with New Year specifically.

New Year is worth a note. Across the former Soviet Union New Year rather than Christmas is the big occasion, and the table on the thirty first is the one that matters. Orders for the twenty ninth to the thirty first are our busiest days of the year by a wide margin, and they need to be placed well ahead.

Ordering around the seasons

If something is not listed, it is not available, and asking us will not produce it. It is off the site for a reason.

If something you want is listed, that is a signal. The strawberry cake appearing means somebody tasted the fruit and thought it was good enough.

Book December early. The last week of December is the only period where 48 hours notice is not enough, and every year some people leave it too late.

Late summer is the easiest time to order. Everything is available at once, which is not true in either direction from here.

What we do not make

We are asked for a few things regularly and it is fairer to say so than to leave people hoping.

No paskha or kulich, though we may one day. No Smetannik, the soured cream layer cake, which comes up often. No crisp French style Napoleon, only the soft Eastern European one. Nothing dairy free, because almost everything we make is built on soured cream, buttercream or condensed milk.

If there is something specific you grew up with and cannot find anywhere in London, send us a message describing it. More than one thing on our list is there because somebody asked.

Buying fruit for a bakery

The reason things come and go is easier to understand from the buying side.

Supermarket strawberries are bred to travel and to sit on a shelf looking red for a week. Those are useful qualities for a supply chain and they are achieved at the cost of the things that make a strawberry worth eating. In June, when British fruit is in and picked close to ripe, the difference is not subtle. In February the same variety, flown in and picked hard, is a different product wearing the same name.

Peaches are worse. A peach that has been chilled below about five degrees stops ripening and goes mealy, and most imported peaches have been chilled somewhere in transit. There is a window of about ten weeks a year when a peach pie is worth making.

Apples are the opposite and the reason the apple pie stays on the list. Good keeping varieties hold their texture in storage for months, so an apple pie in March is genuinely as good as one in October.

Napoleon Cake (18cm)£86Sold outBear in the North Cake£68

Ordering

Everything needs 48 hours notice, 72 for bread. Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 across the rest of London and Surrey, with a £50 minimum on orders.