The custard, dear reader, arrived first — a broad, unhurried lake of it, pale as a Regency ballgown and pooled with such confidence in its little pressed paper vessel that one might have mistaken the packaging for deliberate rusticity. Into this golden sea has been set a raft of sponge, square-shouldered and crumb-fine at the edges, and I must say the cut of it is honest. There is no architectural trickery here, no towering nonsense of the sort one endures at continental hotels. Merely cake, custard, and conviction.
The upper surface is where the establishment declares its intentions. A generous strewing of desiccated coconut, blushed to the precise pink of a debutante who has just been complimented on her posture, sits atop a stratum of strawberry preserve that peeps through the shreds in coral-coloured glimpses — rather like the wallpaper in the east wing, which I have never had the heart to replace. The coconut has been applied with the enthusiasm of a man salting a driveway, and I approve entirely. Restraint in coconut is a vice.
Crowning the whole affair: a piped rosette of cream, thick and ivory-white and holding its ridges with the stiff dignity of a footman at a state funeral, and — atop that — a single fanned wedge of strawberry, glossy, seeded, and pitched at a jaunty angle rather like a hat worn to church by a woman who wishes to be discussed afterwards. The seams of the sponge’s underside are already surrendering to the custard, softening at the corners. This is not a flaw. This is courtship.
A Word on Presentation — One notes that the entire tableau has been served in what appears to be a folded paper coffer, the sort of thing in which one might post a small hat. And yet the custard fills it corner to corner without a single unsightly smear on the rim, which is more than I can say for the soup course at my own cousin’s wedding breakfast. Humble vessel, imperial execution.
I award this confection nine and a half crowns out of ten, withholding the final half only because the strawberry, gallant though it is, stands alone where a pair would have made a proper flourish. Otherwise: exemplary. The staff may inform the kitchen that Her Ladyship was moved.
