CARROT CAKE REVIEW - NO 12 ~ On Aiming To Be Average

York, Yorkshire.

This is is probably the best positioned cafe in York, curved around a corner immediately adjacent to the entrance of York Minster. Most cafes could only dream of the footfall they must get in high season. Inside its a straightforward traditionally styled English Tea Room, with slightly butt clenched staff. After we'd arrived, somewhat late in the day it must be said, the waiter surreptitiously flipped the door sign to Closed. Not long before home now boys and girls.

Now I rarely talk about my experience of the cafes I visit. I focus on the qualities of the carrot cake not the ambiance, customer service etc. I'm not a low rent version of Trip Adviser. But I do find myself warming up for a generalised gripe. I don't mind cafes that tick all the right boxes but fall short of their sales pitch. I absolutely love a cafe that pulls off something truly marvellous as if by magic, often by thinking in detail about the quality of their simple offerings. However, what I do find unforgivable is an independent cafe that has no ambition whatsoever to be more than ordinary. 

York like many a cosmopolitan city has a rich diversity of cafes, from the adventurous and artis-anal to the safe bet of a generic chain. In a tourist hub you might assume that the level of competition would drive standards and uniqueness upward, but the opposite is sometimes true. Easy custom breeds complacency. After decades of visiting cafes countrywide I'm surprised by how common an apathetic coffee and cake is. Maybe my expectations are just too high or hopelessly over optimistic. I find it hard though to imagine there is really a widespread appreciation and demand for a cafe that strives so strenuously to be average. These days, is saying a cafe is not bad, really good enough? 

So, back at the cafe where I was about to receive an acceptable but distinctly average Earl Grey tea, and a slice of carrot cake whose size I'll describe kindly as modest. Now it was 3.30pm on a windy Wednesday in January, and perhaps the cake display counter is always that thinly populated at this time of the day, month, year or millenia. As the staff whisk what remains away to hide them in a freezer overnight. But my heart did sink at the visible lack of cake abundance, had it not been so late we would have walked out and gone elsewhere. So the carrot cake sat on its platter looking alone and winsome, pleading for me to save it from being thrown into the dustbin of black bag oblivion.

As you can see from the photo the cake had a dark cast to it. But once that cake touched the palate, all the riotous fantasies I might have held of a rich complexity of flavouring, vanished. Instantaneous recognition, first, that ' there is insufficient carrot present here', second, though it had a reasonable level of moistness and weighty texture, there was no enriching sweetness of sultanas or walnut nuttiness, third, there was nothing to offset the generally deadening predominance of mixed spice. Which I find makes me rather tetchy because what do I say? ~. A Spice Cake Is Not a Carrot Cake! Probably too much over emphatic use of capitals there, but how else can one convey this confectionary sin?

The one thing to be said in this carrot cakes favour was it did have a cream cheese filling and frosting. To which I give a faint but under-enthused whoop, because this cream cheese sweated like it had a high fever or had been out in an Aussie heatwave for too long, with a consistency that teetered dangerously on the edge of slippery. All in all it was not good. If you like a carrot cake that has the taste and texture of something other than its nomenclature, then this was a dream made for you. But for me, in future, I'll pass.


CARROT CAKE SCORE  4/8