Crumbs and Doilies...

Seems fitting that this post follows the last as this darling little cupcake shop is situated in Kingly Court like the restaurants I mentioned in my past post. 

Crumbs and Doilies may not look like much from the outside but inside are the cutest cupcakes you have ever seen. On their website you can browse the over 30 flavours they have or you can visit their shop where they usually have about 8 flavours out everyday.

You can get a full size cupcake or an exact replica as a mini cupcake. As well as cupcakes Crumbs and Doilies does brownies, rocky roads and big cakes. 

When my mum, my sister and I visited we were just in the mood for a little afternoon pick me up so opted for a bottle of water, a cold brew coffee and 3 mini cupcakes.

My chosen mini cupcake was a snickers cupcake, a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter icing drizzled with chocolate and caramel sauce and topped with peanuts.

Mum's pick was a buttered popcorn cupcake, I'm not quite sure the flavour of the actual cake part but it definitely tasted like butter popcorn, buttery and slightly salty. Of course it was topped off with actual popcorn and a drizzle of caramel.

Em had a Velvet Volcano cupcake which was a red velvet cupcake on a biscuit base topped with cookies and cream icing. I have to say I was a little envious of this one!

Crumbs and Doilies is owned by Youtube Cupcake Jemma who actually has videos on her youtube channel showcasing recipes and baking. 

It is a small shop but entices you to revisit many times to try out all the flavours. When I go back I want to try the biscoff rocky road or maybe a slice of one of their big cakes.

Kingly Court...

There are so many different restaurants in London covering all cuisines so it is usually really hard deciding on where to go for dinner. But not today! We went to Kingly Court in Soho which is a food and drink mecca with over 15 restaurants and cafes situated around the main courtyard. Instead of sitting down and eating our whole dinner at one restaurant we decided to go to 3 different restaurants and order 1 dish from each and share it.

We started right at the top of Kingly Court at Le Bab which is on the 2nd floor. We choose Le Bab as it serves posh kebabs which seemed like a novel idea. Also I had never had a kebab before so this seemed like the perfect place to try one.

Le Bab has a very interesting small menu with unique dishes. It was hard to just pick one dish but we went with the 15-hour free range pork shawarma kebab. We were definitely swayed by the crackling.

It really was tasty with flavours that I hadn't expected when we ordered it. For £12 it initially seemed pretty steep for what is essentially a pork wrap but after tasting it I would say it was worth it.

Moving on from the Le Bab, we next went to Señor Ceviche which is a Peruvian restaurant specialising in Ceviche. We definitely knew we wanted to go for a ceviche here and after perusing the menu for a while went for "The Spaniard" which is a sea bream and king prawn ceviche.

We got given a mini bowl of what looked like sweetcorn and I guess it was sweetcorn but it was salty and crispy. It was like popcorn that hadn't puffed and was very moreish, we finished our little portion.

I accidentally didn't take a photo before we split the ceviche onto our 2 plates but I promise it looked a little more presentable. It tasted really fresh and slightly spicy, on the other end of the spectrum to our pork kebab!

I do have to say that our waitress here was a little miffed that we only ordered one dish to share but I think that was because she was really enthusiastic about the food and maybe thought that she wasn't selling it enough to us. 

The final restaurant that we gave a go was Oka, a sushi restaurant. Here it was a no brainer and we ordered the Spider roll, a soft shell crab uramaki topped with avocado.

It was good sushi, not amazing (I'm talking about you black cod from Sticks and Sushi), but for the price it was really worth it. 

Now we were running out of time so instead of swapping restaurants for dessert we ordered their white chocolate and macadamia nut cookie skillet. This was sooo yummy especially when the ice cream melted into the warm cookie. It is a nice simple idea for a dessert which would be easy to recreate at home.

After our restaurant hopping we hurried up to Madame Tussauds for "The Game's Afoot" which is a live action immersive theatre show. You are the detective and you ask the actors questions to try and work out who the killer is. It was possibly the coolest thing I have ever experienced and I am definitely on the lookout for more things like that to do. I can't tell you much more about it as I don't want to give anything else away so go do it for yourself.

Out of the three restaurants we went to I think Le Bab was the best because it was so different to anything I have had before and the one dish we had was so flavoursome that I really can't wait to go back and try more.

SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave

Pedalos, Picnics and Palaces...

This is a post about an amazing day I had a couple of weeks ago and I am blogging about it because it is a good date day idea for a sunny day.

Boy and I got to Hyde Park on the tube and headed straight for the pedalos on the Serpentine. You can hire them for either half an hour (£10 per adult) or an hour (£12 per adult). We hired them for the hour and made it the whole way around the lake with a few sunbathing and photo stops. On a beautiful day like this you might want to just float around as peddling becomes thirsty work in the heat!

From the pedalos we walked through the park and out the other side to Kensington High Street. There is the Serpentine Gallery on the way which is free so you can have a wander around if you fancy some art. Our sights were set on getting some food for our picnic so we skipped getting some culture.

We went to Whole Foods to buy food for our picnic and literally spent half an hour deciding what to get was there was sooo many options. We ended up with some freshly cooked beef, some marinated prawns, a salad box full of all sorts of things from the salad bar and a focaccia. We had brought a bottle of champagne and a punnet of strawberries with us too in our gorgeous white picnic basket.

Just across the road from Whole Foods is Kensington Palace and Gardens and this is where we decided to have our extravagant picnic. As it was a lovely day, the gardens were full of people but we managed to find a space for our picnic rug and dug in.

It was the best picnic I have ever eaten and the champagne definitely topped it off. We spent the rest of the afternoon lying in the sunshine feeling more than slightly tipsy, almost napping before we even looked around the gardens.

Eventually we hauled ourselves up and went to have a look at the Palace and the Gardens. Kensington Palace is the current residence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and although we didn't go in, we admired it from the outside. The gardens were beautifully planted with all kinds of flowers. There is also a massive lake in the gardens that we may or may not have lay down next to again.

So pedalos, picnic and then palace, write it down in your diary and take your favourite person!

Caravan King's Cross...

On a cold rainy day last November, Boy and I journeyed down to Kings Cross in the hopes of having amazing brunch at Caravan. Alas it was not to be as they had a half an hour wait and due to hunger we hightailed it down the road to Granger & Co. It wasn't actually a problem as we had their famous ricotta pancakes which are still the best pancakes I have eaten to date. In spite of the divine pancakes we still had the desire to have brunch at Caravan one day.

Last weekend was finally the day that we were to try brunch at Caravan. We arrived early to ensure no waiting time.. Too early in fact, it wasn't even open! On Saturday it opens at 10am but is you are early like us there are fountains to look at in the sunshine. Whilst we were eating children actually turned up in their thousands (maybe about a dozen) to play in said fountains.

It was a sunny day so as soon as it opened we grabbed a table outside. The service was really great despite how many people sat down at the same time as us. We were offered water without even asking and the waiter came to take our order promptly.

In desperate need of caffeine we scanned the drinks menu. Boy has a thing for Cold Brew right now so ordered one of those. I inquisitively asked the waiter what a Cascara was and was somehow conned into ordering one. The waiter literally did not explain a thing about it and so when my so called coffee turned up with a lime in it I was a little taken aback. It was not coffee. For future reference, Cascara is Coffee cherry tea. As in tea made from the cherry a coffee bean is taken from. So basically take a coffee back and take away everything good about it (the coffee taste and caffeine) and then mince it down and make this tea. It was cold so refreshing enough and not horrible tasting but it was not the caffeine buzz I was after.

For my brunch I had the Barbecue beans, fried eggs, mojo verde, toast and chorizo sausage. You could pick your toast so I went for sourdough. It was such a good dish and a good choice too as I would never make this at home.

Boy ordered the Baked eggs, tomato pepper ragout, greek yoghurt, merguez sausage and sourdough toast. I can confirm that this was delicious too.

We were so tempted by all the sweet dishes, coconut bread and pancakes mmm, as well as the pastries and muffins but held back as we were going to a food market later.

Just outside the restaurants there are grass steps by the river so we sat and sunbathed until we got too hot.

We are definitely going to return to Caravan and if that isn't a recommendation I don't know what is! There are more adventurous dishes on the menu that we want to give a go and so should you.