The Hummingbird Bakery, London
Last year, I bought the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, based purely on the beautiful traditional home baked goodies that filled its pages. A year later, I was lucky enough to get to visit London, and purely by coincidence, managed to pass the actual store whilst exploring trendy Soho! You can’t miss it, as the book is so true to the store – the pink bird sitting on top of the painted font (a hummingbird dare I say? 
) and the striking red shelves with its wares on display.
Inside the store, it’s even cuter, with pink cupboards, pink and brown checkered floor and rows and rows of perfect cupcakes behind glass display cabinets. (I didn’t notice this lovey dovey couple on the left until I got home, the guy blended so well with the decor ). The restaurant has a row of benches where you can eat it (it costs more though) and enjoy a coffee.
All the treats from the book are on display here. The most popular is the red velvet, and of course the traditional vanilla cupcake, each is adorned with a lick of pastel cream. New flavour of the day was the earl grey tea flavour.
These mounds of calories and goodness were in fact rocky roads, rather than rocky road topped cupcakes as I had imagined.
Apart from the cupcakes, Hummingbird Bakery also has large cakes. Sadly, I didn’t realise you could buy these by the slice, until too late 
Despite the fact that I was still full from lunch, I decided I did not want to carry around a cupcake whilst shopping. So I had to eat one there. Eating in costs just slightly more – but at least it allowed me to dissect what’s so good about these cupcakes 
After much agonising deliberation, I decided on a chocolate cupcake for something different, swathed in a gorgeous lemon coloured vanilla frosting.
The cake to icing ratio was less pleasing to me than to the traditional American audience (ie 50% cupcake 50% ‘frosting’!), however the cake was deliciously moist without being sickly sweet, and the icing wasn’t grainy at all, and quite buttery.
I highly highly recommend the book, the cupcake recipe does in fact have sooo little butter, which means that you can eat them relatively guilt free
Buy the book from Amazon here