Cakes & Things by Windya is a home baker in Mount Lavinia. Her specialty is theme cakes, but her cupcakes and brownies are pretty great as well.
The Cakes
Colombo residents have it good, with a whole bunch of quite brilliant home bakers to choose from (here is our round-up). For those of us in the suburbs, however, the choices are far less. Living in Mount Lavinia, I knew I had to give Cakes & Things a try.
After tasting a whole bunch of her cupcakes we can safely say that we found a good one. What’s impressive is that she does a whole variety of flavours besides the usual choc chips and red velvets, like coffee Baileys, peanut butter cream and lime. Cupcakes are priced between Rs. 120 and Rs. 150 with ones like the Baileys costing around Rs. 180 because of imported ingredients. The minimum order quantity is 12 cupcakes, with 2 flavours.
The triple chocolate (Rs. 150), is as the name implies, a chocolate overdose in the form of a cupcake. It’s a chocolate cupcake, with chocolate frosting, chocolate sauce and a ganache filling. All of it makes for some contrasting yet coherent textures and flavours of chocolate and the ganache filling keeps the cake really moist. More home bakers should follow this trend.
The ribbon cupcake (Rs.120) was very simple but also very tasty, probably my favourite of the bunch. I’ll be the the first one to admit that I’m a sucker for a good ribbon cake, and this cupcake perfectly fits the bill. It’s basically a great rendition of a ribbon cake with a generous amount of smooth frosting which isn’t too sweet or buttery, and a soft butter cake (well, cupcake).
The peanut butter cream (Rs. 150) was also one that we all enjoyed. A few things to remember is that this one isn’t very sweet. It’s actually kind of savory because of the peanuts in the frosting but the combination of savory and sweet work quite nicely together. One thing in general that we really appreciated was that the ingredients used tasted very high quality and she hadn’t cut corners.
If you’re not a fan of frosting, Cakes & Things also does filled cupcakes. We tried the vanilla jam (Rs.95) and it was quite nice. It’s simply a vanilla cupcake with a strawberry jam filling. If we were nitpicking we’d say a bit more filling would have helped.
The other interesting flavour was lime (Rs. 120). We weren’t sure how well it would work since it’s an unorthodox choice of frosting, bit it turned out to be quite refreshing. The cake is the usual vanilla cupcake, but what sets this apart is the lime infused frosting with the addition citrus kick form the grated lime zest.
Orders
While those were the flavours that we found most interesting, Cakes & Things also does custom orders for both cakes and cupcakes. The prices vary depending on the ingredients and detail required, but these will require at least 1 week notice while usual orders can be had within 2-3 days. She doesn’t really have a fixed working hours so you can call her up throughout the day to place your orders.
Conclusion
In our opinion Cakes & Things ranks right up there with some of the best cupcakes we’ve tried. With some interesting and unusual flavours, we think they’re one to watch.
