A dish I can’t forget: saffron tea cake at Toad Bakery

Toad Bakery is south London’s tiny temple to laminated pastry and peerless bread. It also carries a small array of merch, which fittingly includes condoms, because this is a place that elicits strong feelings in people.

When I go to Toad, it is not for the head-turning pastries beloved of algorithms – the seasonal fruit Danishes (poached quince! Glowing rhubarb! Golden custard!), or the ‘everything bagel croissants’, or even the black sesame and white chocolate pain suisse.

Nowadays, I almost always go for their saffron tea cake.

This love affair came about by chance, on a day when I rocked up at the bakery after the usual showstoppers had sold out. There, on the counter, sat a lonely trio of plain Janes, three beige buns studded with dried fruit and coated in a sleet of fine sugar. I bought one – and the world changed.

To bite into a saffron tea cake is to be greeted by a cushion of salted, saffron-infused blonde dough, sweetened by plump sultanas, with flavours that hit every corner of your mouth.

And because it isn’t particularly beautiful in the way that hyped bakery goods tend to be, it allows for a very focused kind of indulgence – a pure gustatory joy uncompromised by feelings of vandalism.

I buy the bun, I eat the bun, I love the bun.