LIVE: Harrods Food Court.

 

Harrods food court, London.

I dunno, doesn’t looking at cake just make you feel calm? I don’t even have to eat it, I’m just taking constant notes inside my head of new flavour combinations and flaked gold leaf and - what if everyone else already knewabout canelés cooked in beeswax and I was the last to hear about them? It would be hugely embarrassing. Somebody up there has made sea salt caramel out of Maldon and Hawaiian black sea salt, with Harrods dark couverture chocolate and a pinch of Brazilian tonka bean; and I don’t know about you but that’s the kind of thing I like to hear about. 

Highlights:

• Green tea macarons with a matcha and white chocolate ganache and a yuzu compote centre. (’Yuzu is, like, it’s a kind of Japanese citrus,’ I attempt to tell my sister three or four times. She pretends not to hear me.)
• ‘Rose Anglaise’, described as ‘the scent of English rose combined with Indian vanilla and white chocolate mousse, filled with raspberry compote on a rich dark chocolate base’. The white chocolate has been tempered and shaped into a folded rose, with flakes of silver leaf brushed across the petals. I will later go home to my one-room apartment and eat some microwaved baked beans from Sainsbury’s ‘basics’ range.
• ‘Douce provence’: ‘Lavandin flower perfumed Manuka honey mousse with a green apple fruit confit and a rich fruit cake heart.’ Did I mention that both showers in my building are broken? Both showers in my building are broken. I wash my hair by bending over my tiny sink with a mug of lukewarm water, like a Victorian orphan.
• ‘La Boqueria Exotique’: ‘a buttery rich coconut and vanilla base covered with mango and passionfruit cremeux, with a liquid raspberry heart, all hidden under fresh tropical fruit’. ‘What is your rent actually paying for?’ my mother asks. I have concluded that the only answer to this is: ‘the privilege of being Not Technically Homeless.’
• London is a strange place to live.