Sweet Couture, Covent Garden

It seems like cupcake consumption is the sole purpose of my being at the moment, and the raison d'etre for this blog. However, this will be the last cupcake powered post for a while, as I have a bikini-centric holiday looming less than 2 weeks away.


Yesterday I moved away from the A-listers of the London cupcake scene (such as Hummingbird and Primrose Bakery) and onto a more unique store, Sweet Couture in New Row, near Covent Garden. Perhaps unique is the wrong word, as I later discovered that they have four branches spread across London, but certainly less well-known at present.

Having been charged with the all important task of showing the rather Welsh and very lovely @rhididdy_ London's finest offerings, I was feeling the pressure after a disappointing trip to KFC and a Pret-A-Manger disaster. I had a very hungry Welsh dragon on my hands.

Tucked down the lovely side street of New Row (which doesn't appear on many printed maps of London, so  befriend Google Maps if you're planning a visit) between Leicester Square and Covent Garden, the premises are very small. Visiting at about 4pm on a Tuesday, the 4 or 5 bar-style stalls were occupied by businessmen on laptops.

Walking back past later, there were empty seats. 

As cupcake cafes don't tend to be the main hangout for London businessmen, I hoped this boded well - this place must either do very good cakes or very good coffee to tempt them away from the nearby chain coffee shops. Outside, the solitary table was taken by a woman who showed no evidence of actually being a Sweet Couture customer. Seems she had just decided to take the weight off for a few minutes, and take the opportunity to fire off a few emails. When a couple of minutes worth of pointed glaring failed to move her (fairplay, she was ballsy), we were resigned to taking our cakes away, which then produced the problem of transporting them with minimal damage, a technique I have perfected through recurrent visits to Sooty's Cupcakery

There were about 8 flavours to choose from - the usual ones such as vanilla with chocolate frosting sitting alongside more unusual flavours such as blueberry, and lemonade. Contrary to many similar stores, they were still well stocked, despite us visiting quite late in the afternoon. Evidently great minds think alike as we both  went for the chocolate and vanilla marble cake.

A short walk down the road later, we found ourselves in what appeared to be a park, but later transpired to be a churchyard, and the munching began.

The lovely @rhididdy_

The first thing that struck us was the icing - it was a deliciously creamy buttercream, far more flavoured than the usual fondants that cupcakes are iced with, replacing this Americanism with a more British alternative. The cake itself was good, although it didn't really taste as expected of marble cake, and was quite crumbly. Overall a good experience, and I think I'll have to return another time to try their more unusual flavours. Somebody's gotta do it...

@rhididdy_ 's conclusion? "Sickly, but in a good way." (This after she was forced to wolf the last bite down when an important looking man with keys came to throw us out of the park/churchyard, like a cakey last orders.

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On the way home I went via Leicester Square and caught the world premiere of Anna Karenina taking place, whilst Jude Law was being interviewed on the red carpet!