National Dessert Day
We’ve been thinking about all the delicious desserts you can get at Braehead.
And our mouths were watering at the thought of tasting a dessert or three from our restaurants and cafes – all in the name of fact-finding research and analysis, of course.
What got us sweet-talking on the subject was that National Dessert Day is on Saturday, October 14. So, we decided it would be a good idea to head out into the mall and taste for ourselves the delightful desserts on offer to visitors.
Our first port of call is Hi Tea, which serves up various flavours of ice cream, cakes and cheesecakes along with a traditional Taiwanese dessert called Mochi, which is a chewy ball made from rice flowers filled with mango or strawberry flavouring.
Next stop on the dessert trail is Caffé Nero, which has more delicious cakes, pastries, cheesecakes and apricot-filled croissants than you could shake a food mixer at.
Just a short walk across the upper mall to Marks and Spencer’s café, there are even more cakes and sponges to choose from. Our favourite was the chocolate orange loaf cake. Or was it the apple and blackcurrant crumble cake? No, it might have been the carrot triple-layer cake. It’s so hard to choose when there is so much to choose from!
From there we then headed to the food mall and paid a visit to the wonderful emporium of pancakes that is Stack & Still. And how lucky were we to get a sneak preview of their new menu, which launched on Tuesday, October 10. They’ve got loads of new desserts including Biscoff Dalgona Coffee Stack, Nutella Pretzel Stack and the Devilled Berry Cheesecake Stack. These sweet pancakes were flippin’ marvellous.
We were really impressed when we ventured into Prezzo and saw the array of desserts, including Prezzo’s Best Ever Chocolate Cake, sticky toffee pudding, Sicilian lemon meringue pie and the chocolate and cherry sundae.
And there were even more dessert delights in Filling Station including a sticky toffee sandwich – which certainly beats the traditional piece ‘n’ jam your granny used to make you – New York cheesecake and lots of different flavoured ice creams.
As well as desserts, all these sit-down restaurants have fabulous menus of starters and main courses for shoppers to enjoy.
Costa Coffee on the lower level of the centre is another café which boasts plenty of cakes to enjoy with your cuppa. Staff there told us the all-time favourite with customers is the ubiquitous caramel shortbread.
If you want your cake and have no qualms about eating it as well, take a trip into Greggs and try a caramel custard doughnut, a Belgian Bun or yum-yums, which sound as good as they taste.
We can recommend the chocolate orange cake in the Jamaica Blue café, although they have lots of other cakes to choose from in this trendy eatery.
If you can pass by all the clothes in Primark without buying something, you’ll quickly come upon Primarket – the store’s popular café. They’ve lots of cakes like lemon drizzle, raspberry and coconut slice and brownies.
Finally, we headed into Starbucks and came across something we just had to try. They’re called cake pops, which is a bite-sized cake on a stick. Kids love them – and so do we – and the cakes are all the rage in America. The café also has a selection of muffins, almond croissants and cinnamon swirls.
Braehead’s cafes also have menus that offer a great choice of quick bites to eat for lunch, mid-afternoon snacks, or as part of your evening shopping expedition.
After our taste buds got tantalised by the wide variety of desserts, cakes and other sweet treats you can enjoy at Braehead, we thought it would be a good idea to find out a bit more about how folks came to fall in love with the dessert as far back as ancient civilisations.
We were amazed to discover that the concept of a dessert can be traced back to the early Egyptians, who enjoyed honey and fruits along with pastries and tarts.
In Europe during the Middle Ages desserts were a symbol of wealth and status as sugar was a luxury ingredient and during the Renaissance period custards, puddings and more complex pastry fillings became popular.
Thanks to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century desserts like cakes and cookies started to be mass-produced and today desserts come in many different forms including pies, cakes, ice cream, chocolate and pastries.
New flavours and baking techniques from different parts of the world are now being used by chefs and bakers to create the yummy treats we all love to eat.
Well folks, that’s us back from paying a visit to dessert Heaven. And in true Oliver Twist fashion, we were very tempted to say: “Please sir, I want some more!”
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