Too much cake. (Sugar and Spice Cafe, Bacton)

Sugar and Spice,

Bacton,

Opening times Every day 9-4:00,

Highly Recommended 

Now fully recovered from the recent coast to coast ride in India I was keen to get back to the familiarity of a Norfolk based cafe cycle ride. I had waited all week for the right rainy and windy conditions and today they were perfect.

I was taking Andrew (who is notoriously hard to please) as my cycling guest and had suggested we head for the coast. Andrew reported he had been poorly while I was away and only been able to return to his bike in the last few days. This was worrying news as in 3 months time we are riding across the Pyrenees (from the Atlantic to Mediterranean) and need to be in tip top condition as we have 11 climbs to complete in a week.

Having recently enjoyed the Bay of Bengal and Arabian sea I felt it would be nice to add the North sea to my list of recently seen seas so we headed out into a gale force wind to Mundesley before going down the coast road, in the rain, to Bacton as we enjoy some lovely views of murky grey sea and gas terminal.

Once at Bacton we found todays target cafe, Sugar and Spice, on the beach road. 

Outside Sugar and Spice cafe

As with the majority of seaside cafes you couldn't actually see the sea but inside was a nicely appointed large indoor seating area leading to a good AAA mark.

No sea view from the large indoor seating area

Normally when out of season cafes have a limited cake selection but this wasn't the case here as it was one of the best cake selections I have seen for sometime. There were also some big sponge cakes with real cream in the fridge. I was able to award a very high effective cake selection (ECS) score.

Part of the excellent cake selection

I went for date and ginger cake before noticing the brownie which I also needed to try as part of brownie of the year #BOTY. Andrew went for summer fruit crumble cake, beans on toast (which is not cake) and cappuccino.

We took our seats and I commented on how impressed I was with what I had seen so far so what could go wrong? Well I'll tell you what could go wrong they only went and served all 3 cakes on their serviettes. I kept very calmly and expertly extracted the napkins but all of them were ruined and rendered useless for future crumb wiping activity. Remember #keepcakeoffserviettes.

Arghhhh!!!! Cake served on it's serviette

Our drinks were both reasonably good and I found the cake to be excellent although Andrew preferred his beans on toast. The brownie was a good one and is in the running to make the brownie off in December although it's early days in my search.

Drinks and very large cakes

Despite the serviette issue I was very impressed with Sugar and Spice cafe and I'm sure it won't be my last visit. I highly recommend a visit.

As the cake portions were very generous we were unable to finish them all so I ended up taking half of it back to Crusader Towers. This was a mistake as when Mrs Crusader spotted cake in the kitchen she thought I had brought it back for her and was not impressed to find I had eaten the lot with my afternoon cup of tea. Suggesting that I was doing her a favour by helping with her weight management didn't seem to help the situation.
Scores

Hot Choc Quality	Guest Hot Drink Quality	Effective Cake Selection	Cake Quality	Ambiance and Atmosphere	Café Rating
6.4	6	8.9	7.6	7.5	7.25

Route

Click here to download 34 mile Aylsham Bacton loop GPX file to your GPS