I was wondering when someone was going to open a nice little cupcake café in Brighton and I have been drooling in the window of this once since it appeared.

Angel Food Bakery is a small café (2 tables and a bar), bakery and can make cupcakes, pies and cakes for parties, weddings and the like to order. They even do a monster cupcake for sharing (or not), 36 times the size of a standard cupcake which was pretty cool. The cupcakes to eat-in or take-away are displayed under gorgeous glass domes on the counter and choosing from the ten or so house flavours is a real issue as they all look fantastic.

I've wanted to try red velvet cake ever since seeing the famous armadillo wedding cake in the Steel Magnolias film. A popular cake in Southern America, the vanilla-cocoa sponge is a shocking red colour and traditionally served with cream cheese frosting, as the cupcake I tried was. It was definitely worth the wait - I could have eaten a whole tray of these. Moist, not too sweet and the slightly sour frosting was dee-dee-lish.



There was a steady stream of people filling the tables and buying boxes of cakes as the kitchen (viewable through a window) worked hard to keep the displays topped up fresh.

I'm utterly passionate about supporting independent and buying local and gems like this make it all the more worthwhile. Brighton has a handful of quality independent cafés and tea rooms but we should encourage even more of them by buying local and telling the big, plasticky coffee chains to *buck off and take their stupid skinny-soy-chocha-mocha-frappa-venti-grande with them.

I'm going back to Angel Food Bakery to work my way through the entire menu.