The Clifton Cake Crawl

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Sunday the 11th March was an important day for Hi Street, as we held the very firstCake Crawl in Bristol!

The idea for Cake Crawl came from a love of cake and a desire to explore Bristol's finest cafés. However, due to limited stomach sizes exploring all Bristol was out of the question, so we decided to keep the first cake crawl centred on Clifton Village where distances are short and easy to walk between venues.

For those of you unfamiliar with Clifton Village, it is a shopping area in Bristol near Brunel's Suspension Bridge that is made up of boutiques, deli’s, galleries, small restaurants and bars. It has its own arcade, where little shops sell vintage furniture, clothes and jewellery. Clifton Village is easy to access as it is on the 8 and 9 bus routes that link it to Clifton, Redland, the city centre and Temple Meads Railway station.

Meet the cake team!

We invited our followers on Twitter to join us for the cake crawl, and had a lovely group of ladies take part, including food and fashion bloggers, boutique owners, and social media experts. Here are our cake-loving friends:

From left to right: Hayley of Ceriselle @hayles, Emily of Bristol Bites @BristolBites, Sam of Canapes and Cupcakes @samfraggle, Rachael @doeeyedcabbage, Sarah @princesspurling, Helen from Boutique 33, @boutique_33.

Lahloo Pantry

We kicked off the cake crawl at Lahloo Pantry on Kings Road. Lahloo is a real gem, one that I only discovered late last year despite having lived in Bristol for nearly eight years. To think I have been missing out on their beautiful café for so long is heart breaking, but I do intend to make up for lost time!

Lahloo Pantry is a compact cafe split across a couple of levels and with an outdoor area for sunny days. It serves Lahloo Tea, which is beautifully presented to match it's delicate flavours. It also serves savoury food too, but we were not there for that of course.

Cake-wise Lahloo has a lot to offer. When we visited the choice was excellent, covering everything from scones, traditional sponges and carrot cake, through to fashionable (and very cute) macaroons. The freshness and quality of the cake here was impressive, as was the presentation of the cakes. Just looking through the pictures we took makes me hungry!

I chose to sample a British classic and personal favourite of mine, Victoria sponge. It was divine – fresh cream and strawberries adorned it and the sponge was the perfect texture, not at all dry. Its something I would definitely have again, although based on how lovely this was, I am sure the other cakes are all worth a try.

Arch House Deli

Moving on, we visited the award winning Arch House Deli, just round the corner from Lahloo Pantry. The Arch House is famous for the selection of cheeses and other delectable goodies it stocks, as well as the brilliant seasonal ranges it brings out – like their special Christmas hampers and Easter chocolates.

The deli also stocks local produce, including the amazing chocolate handbags and shoes made by Clifton Cakes (which is well worth a visit too as you can watch their mini chocolate factory at work while having a coffee!).

Tucked away at the back of the shop is their café area, which many people are not aware of (another hidden gem!). If you live or work in the Clifton area, the deli often does special deals on Twitter, so it is worth following them to see these specials for their café. I can personally vouch for their cookies, which are lovely.

Arch House Deli specialises in polenta cake, and they had kindly put aside a selection of flavours for us to try. We shared four of these between us, as the portion sizes are very generous! Chocolate and star anise, cherry, jasmine, and honey. The chocolate cake divided opinions, either being liked very much, or not, however the jasmine was uniformly loved and @samfraggle loved the cherry one so much she polished off most of it!

The Primrose Café

The Primrose Café is a popular, bustling café, located at the entrance of the arcade in the village. It has plenty of seating upstairs and outside, though at lunch times it tends to be packed as the whole of Clifton appears to want to eat there!

They have a counter of home made cakes to buy by the slice. I enjoyed a cherry and coconut sponge cake which had just the right level of sweetness without being sickly. As this was stop number three, we were all starting to flag a little from the sugar overload and decided to move on to our next stop to have a coffee pick-me-up to get us back on track!

Zazu's Kitchen

Zasu's moved to the Mall in Clifton Village late last year, having formerly been in the heart of Stokes Croft. The kitchen serves fantastic food in a relaxed environment and is really worth visiting to try their delicious seasonal menu.

As well as their main menu they also serve tea and coffee and have a selection of cakes and pastries. When we visited they had run out of cake (a sign it must be good?!) and only had Portuguese custard tarts left, this was not a problem though as they were stunning, and unanimously loved. They had perfect pastry and a lovely custard filling that wasn't too heavy. Just wonderful!

Zazu's pepped us up, and left us ready to tackle our final stop of the day, Cordial & Grace.

Cordial & Grace

This cute sewing café opened on the Mall late last year, by the lovely Maria. It is decorated beautifully upstairs in the café, and downstairs in the sewing room and it feels like a very special place. Maria and her team made us all feel very special too, giving us a lovely welcome and a delightful selection of cakes on a tasting platter along with a bottle of prossecco! We also enjoyed some savoury scones baked with pesto and served with sour cream and chutney. These were warm from the oven and were perfectly light and delectable.

The cakes we sampled included lemon drizzle, chocolate and peanut butter brownie (this was seriously good) and many more.

The presentation of the cakes and scones was excellent and really added to the experience. I think its fair to say that Cordial & Grace was the perfect place to conclude the cake crawl, and left us all feeling very looked after and like we had been part of something a bit special, which is something you rarely experience in a chain store coffee shop.

Hopefully cake crawl has helped inspire you to take a look at your local cafés and go and try the special things that they have on offer, or perhaps you are brave and would like to have your own Cake Crawl?! If so, please do let us know, we are always interested in hearing about local gems!

The idea behind Hi! Street is to discover new places in your area and support independents. We really believe that it is important to support our local retailers and celebrate them. The Cake Crawl is just one of the ways we are doing this, there are more to come!

A note about how we ran cake crawl:

We invited a group of bloggers and tweeters to attend cake crawl with us, so that they could share the venues on our schedule alongside us, giving the independent café’s more exposure. We rewarded them by sponsoring the cake crawl and providing them with a goody bag to take away. If you keep a blog, and are passionate about supporting independent shops and venues and would like to be part of any future events we run, please email us.

Welcome to our new blog

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:38:00 +0000

Hello, thanks for dropping by! This is our brand new Hi Street blog, where we share our adventures discovering the best and most exciting independent retailers, cafés, restaurants, pubs and bars across Bristol.

Each member of our team is passionate about supporting independents, and will contribute to what you read here. We'll also be recruiting other authors who share our love of promoting small businesses to keep things fresh and interesting for you.

If you have any questions, or you'd like to suggest something for us to feature here, please get in touch with Bonny who will be looking after this blog: bonny@histreet.co.uk

Hi Street Ltd