Where to Order Fresh Cakes and Pastries in London

Almost every bakery in London calls its cakes fresh. The word appears on shop windows, on delivery sites and on supermarket boxes, and it has been stretched so far that it now tells you very little. A cake baked yesterday is fresh. A cake baked three weeks ago and frozen is also, by most legal definitions, fresh once it has thawed.

So it is worth setting out what actually happens between an order and a delivery, because the difference is real even if the word covering it has stopped being useful.

Two ways a cake reaches you

The first way is that the cake already exists. It was made in a production kitchen to a schedule, chilled or frozen, and sent to a shop or a warehouse to wait. When you order, someone takes one off a shelf and sends it. This is how most cake delivery in London works, and it is not a scandal. It is the only way to offer same day delivery, it keeps prices down, and a well made frozen cake can be perfectly good.

The second way is that the cake does not exist until you order it. You choose a date, the order goes into a baking list, and the cake is made for that date. Nothing sits waiting. This is how we work, and it is why we ask for 48 hours rather than offering delivery this afternoon.

Neither approach is better in the abstract. They suit different things. If you have forgotten a birthday and need a cake by six o'clock, the first is the only one that can help you. If the cake matters and you have a few days, the second gives you something the first cannot.

What the extra time is actually for

The 48 hours is not padding. Some cakes genuinely need it.

Medovik, the honey cake, is the clearest case. Its layers go into the fridge firm and come out soft, and that transformation happens overnight as the soured cream works into the sponge. A medovik served the day it is assembled is a different and worse cake. The layers still have bite, the flavours have not settled, and it tastes like a stack of biscuits rather than one thing.

Napoleon is the same. The whole point of the Eastern European version is that the puff pastry softens against the custard cream until it is tender all the way through. That takes a night. Serve it immediately and you have a millefeuille, which is a fine cake but not the one you ordered.

Kyiv cake needs its buttercream to work into the meringue discs so the crunch gives way rather than shatters. Too soon and it is brittle. Too late and it has gone soft entirely.

For these three, the resting is not a delay before the cake is ready. It is the last stage of making it.

What we bake and what it costs

We work out of Belgravia in central London and deliver across London and Surrey. The range runs to about fifty things at any time, and it moves with the seasons.

The cakes are the centre of it. Honey cake at £68, Napoleon at £85, Bird's Milk at £78, Kyiv at £80, Prague at £75, Cipriani at £98, Esterházy at £75, carrot cake at £65, pavlova at £72, Basque burnt cheesecake at £60 and Charodeyka at £50. All are 18 cm, which cuts into ten to twelve slices.

Then there are the things that are harder to find in London than the cakes are. Oreshki, the walnut shaped shortbread shells filled with dulce de leche, pressed two at a time in a hinged iron mould. Trubochki, the crisp cream horns. Sochniki, sirniki, kartoshka. Pirozhki with cabbage and egg, potato and onion, mushroom, liver, or meat and cabbage. These are the orders that most often come with a note attached saying somebody's mother used to make them.

There are tarts, pies, cinnamon rolls, choux, cookies, truffles and, on Wednesdays only, bread.

Where the limits are

Being small imposes some rules, and it is better to know them before you order than after.

We need 48 hours on everything, and 72 on bread. Bread is baked on Wednesdays only, so a loaf means choosing a Wednesday delivery date at least three days out.

There is a minimum order of £50. Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 everywhere else we go, which covers all London postcodes and a good deal of Surrey, Kent and the Home Counties. Kingston, Esher, Guildford, Woking, Bromley, Croydon, Watford, Richmond and Twickenham are all within range.

Some things are seasonal and simply are not available for parts of the year. The strawberry cake and the strawberry tart come off the site when the fruit stops being worth eating, which is a decision made on taste rather than on the calendar. We would rather lose the sale than send out a £65 cake built on pale supermarket strawberries in February.

Ordering for something that matters

For a birthday or a dinner, the website is the whole process. Choose the cake, choose a date at least two days ahead, add candles or a piped message if you want them, and pay.

For a wedding, a large party or a corporate order, it is better to talk. Large cakes are not the same recipe scaled up, portioning for a hundred people is a different calculation from portioning for ten, and there are usually questions about timing and setup that a checkout form cannot handle. We do consultations in Belgravia by appointment, and it is worth arranging one well ahead of the date rather than a fortnight before.

The short version

Fresh is a word doing very little work these days. What is worth asking any bakery is simpler. Did this cake exist before I ordered it, and if not, when will it be made? The answer tells you most of what you need to know, and it tells you a good deal more than the word on the box.