CARROT CAKE REVIEW 21 - Where The Art Isn't

Cromer, North Norfolk.

This visit and review took place and was written before the lockdown.

This cafe is tucked to one side of the High Street facing the magnificent elegance and edifice that is Cromer Parish Church. The cafe is overlooked in many other ways, I'll mention two. One, in Winter its windows mist up so badly you'd think there was a sauna going on inside, and two, its a not fully convincing hybrid of cafe and art/craft gallery. From the street it presents a mixed message: what would make you go in there; what is this trying to be? Does the gallery have something to say other than the provision of quality caffeine and catering and is this integrated  into the ethos of the cafe as a whole, or is the rest of it solely a bit of arty set dressing?

We've been to here a few times, its never been atrociously bad, but any expectations of superlative coffee or cakes will always be shaken awake from their wistful dreaming. The art on show speaks volumes. The presentation and quality of them is quite average. Largely hovering in that twilight region between the amateur and the gifted semi-professional maker, where you know you've seen these ideas before, and that they can be done a lot better.

The cafe appears to have changed hands recently. The art /craft on show is grouped better. The real problem is curation, the third rate devaluing the better quality. With a cafe/ gallery hybrid both aspects ought to augment the other. The coffee /cakes matching the quality of the art and vice a versa. Here average cafe meets average art.  But then if you pitch yourself a notch or two above a church craft fair, this will let the whole thing down. If you are going to flaunt artistic pretensions by calling yourself The Art Cafe, then why not fulfil them to abundance?

So, that's all well and good, but what about the carrot cake? Come on Vidyavajra do your self- appointed job properly, you've painted the scenery, what happened here? I've had a previous painful culinary experience in this cafe, admittedly under the old management, with a courgette and lime cake that would've failed a blind taste test. The courgette and the lime were so finely balance they appeared to negate each other, producing a cake empty of all flavour and relish. Under new ownership, lets give them another chance. I ordered my slice of carrot cake with a flat white chaser and quietly sat awaiting delivery.

The usual cake & coffee photo lies imprisoned on my phone, so you will just have to imagine what the cake and the flat white looked like as served. The size of the cup the flat white arrived in was almost as big as the cake, which tells you only one thing doesn't it?  This will not be a flat white of small but superlative joy, but a downsized latte with jumped up pretensions. As such it was fine, but as a flat white it was not OK, and lets leave it there shall we, lest the vented steam emitted from all my orifices mists up the cafe's windows..... again.

Now to the cake, judged on outward appearance alone looked promising, a sizable slice, good colour and recognisable carrot texture, with very evident sultanas evenly spread across it. I bit my lip and held my suspicious nature in check for a while, sat back and really took it in. It might, after all the preening pickiness of my preamble, be a surprise pleasance.

Once rendered to the mouth, tongue and palate the texture held up well. The sultanas tasted succulent and there was a gentle suggestive amount of spices. It was perhaps a tad too airy for a carrot cake, it could have born being a little weightier to fully meet my admittedly exacting standard. The filling and frosting was a cream cheese one, thankfully, of adequate dimensions and not overly sweetened. The top frosting had the obligatory freckle of catering chopped nuts, which whilst providing welcome texture always exist in a culinary dimension where flavour can not survive. In short, it was quite good, in an above average sort of way.

Postscript
Later that day we both had badly upset stomachs. What was it that we both had?  Our minds cast back to those last two pieces of carrot cake we took from the cake counter and their cream cheese filling. Lets just hope it wasn't those, eh?


CARROT CAKE SCORE  - 5/8