Ever since Marie Antoinette, the cake has been a trend setter but now - in a radical step - it has become simultaneously chic and intellectually hip.
Fashionable cupcake chain Buttercup is launching a series of outlets in London in the same week that the London Review of Books, no less, is opening its London Review Cake Shop in Bury Place. They're due to start baking on November 7.
Intriguingly, no one has yet suggested a merger of the Aussie "Buttercup" and the Pommie "Cake Shop", but it can only be a matter of time.
The LRB sees its cake shop as the heir to the London coffee house of restoration times, and hopes to stimulate the sales of books and magazines - as well as cake.
If the Times Literary Supplement should follow suit, tea-time could become the basis for a new kind of symposium.
