Venting my spleen about the Cake Canteen

  

9 April 2024

 

CAKE CANTEEN

Rear of the Hertex building, Upper Maynard Street, Gardens, Cape Town

 

(Please excuse the paucity of pictorial splendour.  I hadn’t planned on writing anything about this outing; I just photograph everything I eat as a matter of course.)

 

This venture is the latest in a mini cavalcade of short-lived ventures that replaced The 1987 Eatery, such as a pop up Coco Safar and a Vida é Caffé outlet. I wouldn’t bet my life savings on the Cake Canteen outlasting this year.

 

The interior and courtyard are beautifully furnished and decorated, as one would expect from a café associated with a business geared towards interior decorators but, sadly,   the huge tree that once towered over the courtyard has been cut down.

 

So, as far as setting goes, this is a marvellous space. The business model, though, is coffee (and a pot of English tea) cakes and pastries, with, if I understood it right, only a cheese and ham filled croissant as savoury option.

 

We used to love brunching at The 1987 Eatery, both for the look of the place and the scrumptious food, and the Cake Canteen can’t compete in the latter department. Neither of us are the type of people who’d frequent a dessert café on a regular basis and a savoury croissant isn’t much of a drawcard.

 

The pastries and cakes are displayed at the service counter.  Three cakes were under glass on cake stands but there were two uncovered rectangular rainbow layer cakes in front of the cake stands and I wasn’t sure whether these were for display only or actually for sale. It just didn’t seem okay to me to leave cakes out like that. 

 

The wife had that savoury croissant and it was okay, pretty much the kind of simple food that’s difficult to mess up.  I’d eaten earlier and was happy with a slice of salted caramel vanilla cake. The other options were cheese cake (natch) and perhaps a chocolate cake and there were muffins too, including a red velvet one the wife ordered, and those exposed rainbow cakes.

 

The crumb on the vanilla cake was good, there was enough of a subtle hint of salted caramel for letter-of-the-law compliance with the trades description act and plenty fancy decorative icing but the total effect was of anonymous blandness. Maybe that’s what one deserves for keeping it vanilla, though.

The red velvet cupcake was  tasty enough without setting the woods on fire.

 

The coffee was good.

 

I paid R270,00  including tip, for four coffees and the edibles but wasn’t paying too much mind to individual pricing and can’t enlighten you there. I think the slice of cake might’ve been between R80,00 and R90,00.

 

The wife’s take on it is that the cakes on offer look and taste mass produced with artificial colouring and flavouring and utterly overpriced. She says they won’t last more than a few months. We brunched at Kleinsky’s recently and, comparing a slice of, for example, their Russian honey cake (a huge, fresh slice with superior ingredients for only R60,00) to those weird, industrial-looking confections at the Cake Canteen, there is no way we can recommend this emporium to anyone despite the loveliness of the setting.