London’s hotel bakeries: ‘You didn’t tell me it was going to be this fancy!’

And who exactly was that day out for?” chortled one of the dads, mocking my idea of a half-term activity (taking the Uber boat down the Thames to Millbank Pier for sausages and chips at Regency Café). His family had been to a new soft play – one that had made the blogs for being markedly better than the others. If you know millennials, you’ve heard it before: we spent our childhoods in B&Q playing with the show toilets and our kids spend theirs being aggressively entertained…

“Let them be bored!” the parenting experts decree, but boredom can be messy and loud. I jump at the moments when my children’s interests intersect with mine – like when they wanted to learn the choreography to 5, 6, 7, 8 by Steps. Everyone in any family enjoys a moderate schlep for a cinnamon bun so, as a treat, I planned two half-term days out. My older daughter, Zip (six), and I would sashay around the patisseries of some of London’s poshest hotels: Hotel Café Royal, the Berkeley, the Connaught and Claridge’s.

Cakes & Bubbles, in Hotel Café Royal, is a dessert cafe by Albert Adria who ran (and was head pastry chef at) the legendary Spanish restaurant El Bulli. Cakes & Bubbles is on a Piccadilly corner, providing excellent people-watching. The dining room is so exquisitely lit and glamorously adorned – huge amounts of marble in shades of caramel and cream, frothy blossoms – that it bathes you in gold. A customer is manspreading while loudly mansplaining the concept of manspreading, but Zip is busy noticing her surroundings: “You didn’t tell me it was going to be this fancy!”

I go for the Golden Egg (£10), which arrives looking the part. The waiter explains I mustn’t eat the shell, because that’s actually an eggshell – I must turn it over and eat through the carefully carved hole. The innards are perfect – rich, dark, caramelly flan with buttery passionfruit curd. But the whole actual-eggshell thing (isn’t there a more fun, edible way to make it look like an egg?) leaves me less than enchanted. Zip is enamoured with a mandarin jelly (£6), served in hollowed-out peels – juicy and visually delightful (“I actually thought it was a wobbly orange!”). El Bulli’s most iconic dish, a feat of molecular gastronomy, was the “spherical olive”. It looked like an olive on a spoon, but was olive juice encapsulated in a film so it would explode in your mouth. With the orange and the egg, I am taking Zip into a bold new world: one where foods are not what they seem.

I became aware of Cedric Grolet’s trompe-l’oeil lemons in lockdown, when nothing I saw on Instagram seemed too peculiar. They are multi-layered desserts of compotes and mousses that look exactly like lemons. Cedric Grolet at the Berkeley buzzes with young people clutching their phones. They, too, have seen Grolet wielding comically large trays of luxurious fruit countless times on social media, magicking them into fine patisserie via the power of editing. The staff appear so over it all that I am too embarrassed to ask where the lemons are. We choose a vegan mango iteration, along with a coconut-passionfruit tart. The (single serving) tart is a dream to behold, with gorgeous piped petals. It costs £18. Imagine if you were taking it on the tube (we are; I anxiously wedge the bag between my feet). Later, the whole family gathers round and it is fantastic. Crumbly pastry, ethereal coconut mousse, crunchy coconut praline. I have seen videos of Grolet’s fruits collapsing at the touch and our mango does the same. “A chocolate shell with a tangy bit and some foam is not really a dessert,” Zip says. We decide we’d rather have a box of six kesar mangoes from the shop in Leyton.

On our next day out, we approach the new Claridge’s Bakery (by London-born but now international star baker Richard Hart) from a backstreet where black-cab drivers polish their bonnets. Zip says this must be the place because it looks like the Brick Oven Bakery from Sylvanian Families. The bakery is a John Pawson-designed counter with a kitchen behind it – it’s not wholly apparent it has anything to do with Claridge’s. You must take your baked goods away, along with a filter coffee out of a tap (which is possibly chic, I’m not sure). The menu is giving Sylvanians, too, with English treats from high streets of yore – French fancies, lardy cakes, iced fingers. Unlike Cedric Grolet, i It’s priced like my local bakery, which is perhaps why they don’t let you in the main entrance.

I get a ham and cheese swirl, but it’s so sweet I feel like they might have used the wrong dough. The French fancies are delicious, especially the yuzu one, but my daughter is right, this proclivity for foam inside shells is mystifying. Zip is beyond besotted with her apple turnover, which she says is like combining a croissant with an apple crumble – two of her great loves. I watch her polish off the whole thing and think: how fun for her to find a new thing. Six-year-olds are always finding their things – that’s why they’re so fun to be around. I need to dispose of my sad ham swirl and she helps me by taking my paper Claridge’s bag and swinging it deftly by her side. She says “I’ve got it, Mum!” and my heart swells. I think about how she carries her own schoolbag and water bottle every day now and I’ve not really paused to notice.

Finally, at Nicolas Rouzaud at the Connaught, I see red. Not because the perfect little St Honore is £15, but because of the wild strawberries atop Zip’s tart and the stunning scarlet banquettes. Of all the bakeries we’ve visited, this is the loveliest to be in. The Berkeley, Claridge’s and the Connaught are all owned by the same group and they are all expressing the same idea in different ways, letting a renowned baker plant themselves among all that tradition. It works to an extent, but taking them all in at once gives me a theme-park feeling, like I’m drifting from Tomorrowland to Frontierland. I can hear Zip whispering in awe – that she can’t believe there’s custard underneath the strawberries, that the berries are perfect little balls of wonder, that the gold is actually edible. It’s very quiet but for the sound of her baby furby (oops) and the occasional supercar grunting past. We take our time.

I think about who these bakeries are for. Is it us? Is it pastry connoisseurs? Is it hotel guests mooching down for elevenses? Is it Instagrammers who pay the congestion charge to film themselves eating fake fruit in their cars? Then, I’m thinking about that half-term we did go to an alternative soft play and it didn’t have coffee and Zip was overwhelmed by the scale of the ballpit. Her fear of losing her sister in there seems to have become a core memory. She peers up over her juice at me and says: “What? I’m only slurping!” And I know we’ll both remember this forever – for the right reasons (and probably not the mango).