Cup

Now for something completely different!  As many of you know, my life pretty much revolves around chocolate so you can imagine my delight when I discovered that Cup (little Belmont street ‘tea salon and café’) do a ‘chocolate afternoon tea’ where all components are chocolate-based!!  My gorgeous friend Sarah is a fellow chocoholic so I decided to coerce her into joining me (in fairness, not that much coercion was required) – so off to Cup we headed, each with our 8 month old in tow.  Firstly, the décor, what fun!  It really captures the kitsch / retro / artisan fusion vibe it’s going for – so lovely.  Loads of ace details including a feature wall with gorgeous wallpaper, a bookshelf filled with very relevant titles, wooden backed super cute menus and comfy sofas at the back with plenty of space for a rowdy wee boy in a highchair!   You can tell absolutely loads of thought has gone into every aspect and in spite of all the neat bits and pieces it isn’t in the slightest bit cluttered – spot on.  Surroundings wise, my only criticisms would be that it is too hot (I’ve been a couple of times and it was the same both times) and it’s too humid (steamed up windows in a café are a pet hate of mine – get a dehumidifier pronto!!).  So, needless to say, we opted for the chocolate afternoon tea (the lovely waitress offered us the option of sandwiches in place of the nutella toasties if we wanted to tone down the chocolate madness but we didn’t, we were up for the challenge!).  We also both went for hot chocolates with maltesers and marshmallows, no cream of course, THAT would have been greedy! 

Our drinks arrived promptly and then we didn’t have too long a wait at all before we were presented with our gorgeous afternoon tea!  Working from bottom to top, nutella toasties, scones with clotted cream and chocolate, pain au chocolat, chocolate dipped strawberries, macarons, white chocolate crispies, truffles and tray bakes!! Oh my!  We happily worked our way through these goodies and I’m delighted to report that every single one was a winner – with things like this I’m always cynically expecting them to look cute but taste a bit ‘brown’ rather than proper chocolatey.  I couldn’t have been more wrong!  Our favourites were the macarons, the toasties and the strawbs. We both agreed we might have benefited, however, from taking the waitress up on the offer of some savoury substitution as we were totally beaten by the chocolate and ended up both taking doggy bags with us!   All in all though, a totally delightful and decadent afternoon tea that I look forward to repeating!!