The warm sticky toffee pudding with caramel sauce at Rules restaurant is the best.

Or one could tuck into Rules' Golden Treacle Sponge (with custard)

http://www.seriouseats.com/images/20...acleSponge.jpg

zeppole--Rules golden treacle sponge with custard looks delicious but each time when we're in London, I can't resist their sticky toffee pudding. It makes my mouth water as I'm typing! I'll fix this dessert once a year at Christmas but it isn't quite the same as having it at Rules. Just wish London wasn't so far away!

The name is so beautiful

Golden Treacle Sponge

zeppole: thanks for the reminder about wonderful wholemeal biscuits, a treat way more wonderful than its name!

PS: Katie 2

It's a BUTTERSCOTCH sauce at Rules. The pudding is a date pudding. Here's a recipe, but I can't guarantee it's the same as Rules'

http://ourredhouse.blogspot.com/2009...terscotch.html

Even McVitie's are good! (That's a lovely name for a wholemeal biscuit too.) I like to eat the unhealthy kind of McVitie's Digestives-- with dark chocolate on them:

http://www.british-food-shop.de/WebR..._0020_logo.jpg

Also Fortnum and Mason in the Piccadilly has a wonderful selection of cakes, pastries and biscuits.

zeppole--Thanks for the recipe. I'll have to try the butterscotch sauce. The recipe I have also is a date pudding.

Across Piccadilly from Fortnum & Mason's on Old Bond Street is an English chocolate shop with the French name of Charbonnel et Walker. The chocolates are wonderful.

Don't neglect Cadbury bars. They are so much better there than in the U.S. where Hershey makes them.

I have a favorite London bakery. It is on Villiers Street, just north of Embankment tube station, but I know it by sight only and not by name. I don't think it is a chain, but maybe it is. When in London, my last stop every evening is there to get a pastry (or 2 or 3) for breakfast the next day.
For whatever it's worth, I recently read a review that said the custard tarts at Marks & Spencer are rated by some as the best in London. I haven't tried them but certainly intend to when I am there this fall.
Harrod's is too expensive for my taste. The name automatically increases the prices good bit and I have seen some identical items in other shops for little more than half of what they are maked in Harrod's.

Le Pain Quotidien is a chain from Belgium which makes it Belch.

I once saw a store that sold biegels and until I said aloud, I had no idea what they were. And when I looked at them, there was only one word, "Pull!!"

The important thing about Zeppole's paean of praise is that many of the things she admires are - bread apart, which the poster says is already covered - all available at practically any decent supermarket.

We don't have a culture of patisseries, which is why most of the ones so far cited are, or were at some point in their lives, French. English cakeshops used to be popular, if awful, in the 1950s, and gently died. There's a review of modern mainstream survivors at http://www.timeout.com/london/restau..._bakeries.html You'll see they've got a heavy Continental influence: I'm unaware of anywhere in central London selling proper traditional home-made style English cakes - stuff you can buy in any provincial Women's Institute market, but in London you have to trek out to the Maids of Honour tearoom near Kew station to get a himt of them.

There's also been a recent fad for shops selling tweely decorated cupcakes: my prediction for the first mass casualty field of the forthcoming retail recession, but as long as they survive, there's a recentish review at http://www.timeout.com/london/restau...rticleAfterMpu.

Otherwise, Zeppole lists things that are usually made in factories: there's no secret little shop in London selling exclusive shortbread (again: something you often stumble over at WI markets). Horrod's and Fortnum's just sell the same stuff real food stores sell, but for twice the price with ten times the snootiness. The food hall in the basement of John Lewis, Oxford St, has all the biscuits etc you could want - except those exclusively sold under the Marks & Spencer brand, which are most easily accessible in the centre in the M&S at the west end of Oxford St, near Marble Arch.

The things I mentioned are often baked at home, which is why I couldn't tell the OP where to go to find them.

PS: I have to say I'm surprised that no bakery in London sells really good traditional scones, sponge cakes, buns, etc. I don't disbelieve flanneruk, I just would have thought there was a market for them. I find recipes for them all the time -- delicious ones are not hard to make.

Some commercially biscuits are indeed the real thing in and of themselves, and no baker is going to improve on them. But many jam tarts and other baked goods are best when freshly made. Maybe people have just gotten used to the plastic-wrapped stuff and won't pay for the handmade.

Are cupcakes passe in London?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/lif...cle7097540.ece

>>I find recipes for them all the time -- delicious ones are not hard to make. <<

Exactly. People who really care make them for themselves, those who don't buy them in the supermarket.

>>Are cupcakes passe in London?<<

Occasionally, I've seen some nice young ladies selling fancy handmade cupcakes in the alternative Brick Lane Sunday market (I forget the exact branding, but it's an empty warehouse on the corner of Hanbury St); but maybe they've moved on. I find it hard to imagine anyone asking for a "whoopie pie" with a straight face, but you never know.

In Italy, ovens are rare enough that people just go with their favorite baker. It is not uncommon to have three to six bakeries in what would be a small town.

In America, it seems people don't have the time -- or don't have the basic cooking skills -- to bake for themselves. But you can do a land-office business selling things like home-made cupcakes to grown ups in the middle of Manhattan for people who like home-made. There is a huge difference between home made baked goods and store=purchased baked goods in America, unless the supermarket incorporates a high-end bakery on the premises.

"I'm surprised that no bakery in London sells really good traditional scones, sponge cakes"

I'm absolutely no expert on cakes. But the stuff people bring from storied London bakeries either proves that my dislike of all that goo is well-founded, or is Frenchified prettiness. Totally different from the (to my taste still only just passable) cakes sold at every WI stall and every Parents' Association fundraiser in the provinces.

Though we eat more sweets (ie the English for "candy") than anyone else in the world, except for the Scots, we absolutely don't share America's cult of dessert-worship and this extends to cakes and the like. "Pie", by itself, in English almost always implies savoury. It's not mandatory in England to make "yummy" noises (or their written equivalent) at every mention of sweet things: doing so sounds verging on infantile here. Our self-indulgence vices tend more to fat and booze than sugar.

The post-Elizabeth David revolution in the cooking skills of a minority has meant either lightish, fake-Med, fruity sweet courses, or "traditional" (sometimes, in fairness, at least 20 years old) puddings like Eton Mess, Summer Pudding or Banofee Pie. None are the kind you buy from a pastry shop, and some - like banofee or sticky toffee pud - are probably just as good bought from M&S as made at home.

Although I agree with you that Britain doesn't share America's infantile dessert cult, I do seem to recall that baked treats occupied a pretty honored place in British everyday eating -- although they are not slathered with frosting, and often just short of being sweet (and I'm not taking about savory pies). Bakewell tarts or a banbury cake seemed pretty common to me in places to sit down and have a cup of coffee or tea, along with all kinds of gingery and jammy biscuits, and not ones coming out of boxes, but tasting home-made.

But it did also seem to me that last time I was in London I saw American-style brownies, cupcakes and oversized chocolate chip cookies.