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We (Danielle and Jake) just got back from some time in London. We’re still recovering and making notes about new cupcake flavors based on things we were inspired by in England. We wanted to make a quick post to suggest a few of our favorite places for vegans in London, if any of you happen to be visiting anytime soon.

Without further ado, here are some of the highlights:

Tibits – This is an awesome vegetarian buffet place right off Regent Street with a hot and cold food bar. The food is all by weight, and it’s extremely reasonably priced for the area. Lots of really awesome pub-style vegetarian food, and at least half of it is vegan. They also clearly mark which ones are vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc. Super friendly service, too. This was probably our favorite place to eat because of the great location and great food.

inSpiral – This place is right on Camden High Street, which is another great location. Everything is vegan, with a few entrees and a few sides to pick from. The food was very good (especially the potatoes), and they also have really great homemade vegan ice cream and free wifi. Camdentown is a great area to visit in general too, with lots of awesome little shops, and an EXTENSIVE marketplace on the weekends selling everything from clothing, to veggie burgers, to artwork (like the awesome print we bought from Daniel Worth – www.danielworthart.com).

Whole Foods Kensington – We also spent a lot of time at this Whole Foods on Kensington High Street. It’s one of the larger Whole Foods we’ve come across, and they had a great selection of vegan goodies including white chocolate bars, veggie “pasties” (sort of like a giant empanada), muffins, and a decent salad bar.

Flemings Mayfair – We had a really great vegan afternoon tea at the Flemings Mayfair hotel twice while we were in London. They did a great job, providing soymilk for the tea, and a tower full of sandwiches (using Sheese spread, we believe), scones, chocolates, and muffins. We highly recommend it for the great overall experience, but please note, you must book 24-48 hours in advance to make sure the hotel restaurant has vegan options available.

222 Veggie Vegan – This place was a little out of the way, but the food was excellent. They have a lunch buffet that we didn’t get to try (but sounds great), but we did have dinner there and everything was really good. They also had some tasty desserts. Worth the trip out of the way once, at least. Definitely worth stopping by more often if you’re in the area.

Mildred’s – We had a quick dinner at Mildred’s which consisted of veggie/bean burgers that tasted way better than the description sounded. Everyone recommended/raved about their savory mushroom and ale pies, but we both kind of hate mushrooms so we didn’t try that one. Might be worth a shot if you can stand mushrooms better than we can.

Vx – Last but not least, this shop isn’t really a restaurant, but they do offer some vegan coffee-shop drinks, as well as some packaged vegan junk food, and some frozen food. They’re also a full-on vegan clothing shop, selling vegan-themed t-shirts, as well as vegan shoes, vegan belts and wallets, and more. Rudy and Sarah were super awesome to us, even taking time to sit down and draw us maps to help us get around to some of the places mentioned above! The only bad thing about this shop is that it makes us wish they’d open one up near us.

All in all, we were really happy that London proved to be pretty vegan-friendly, and now we’re just dying to get back. Hopefully this list helps out anyone planning a trip there!

We got a shipment in the mail today that made us all really happy here. We’re happy to announce that as of right now, we’re going to be carrying all four varieties of the Go Max Go vegan candy bars. For anyone unfamiliar, these are basically really yummy vegan versions of popular candy bars. The Jokerz bar is like Snickers, while the Twilight is like Milky Way, the Buccaneer is like Three Musketeers, and the Mahalo is like Almond Joy. They’re available in our shop for $2.50 each!

The NYC Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti raised close to $5000 this past weekend! Home-bakers and crafters from around the area made baked goods and crafts for the event. We were also happy to donate to the event! Visit the Flickr page for photos.

We all know cupcakes are awesome, tasty, and pretty much the greatest thing since sliced bread, right? That’s all well and good, but every once in a while, cupcake bakers get a little bored and decide to start playing around with the deep fryer. What happens next? Glad you asked. DONUTS!

We recently started toying with some dough recipes and decided we should buckle down and figure out vegan donuts. If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter, you’d know that we churned out our first couple batches over the last few days and have been giving them away for free. Well, the testing was a success so they’re out of beta now, and with your feedback we think we’ve got them down pretty well. We’re going to start offering them as often as humanly possible from now on, alongside our cupcakes and cookies. For now it’ll be sort of a grab-bag of flavors and toppings, but we promise they’re all delicious.

So thanks to everyone who stopped by and enjoyed a free donut this week. We hope you enjoyed them, and we hope you’ll be back for more now that they’re on sale. Oh, and of course, like everything else we make, they’re mostly organic, and entirely vegan (dairy- and egg-free).

Last weekend, members of The Post Punk Kitchen (a vegan message board) had a meetup in Rutherford. This meetup was at the nearby Rutherford Pancake House, which has an awesome vegan menu that we, here at Sweet Avenue, can vouch for. Suffice it to say that we’re quite pleased they opened up a mere 4 blocks away.

After they hit up the Rutherford Pancake House, they dropped by here for dessert! We’ve met many of them before, and some of them are among our most awesome regular customers, so it was great to see them all together for a while. They even managed to bring along JoJo (the pink-haired girl) from the UK! I think she’s officially traveled the farthest for our cupcakes, so far (Asians, Australians and Pacific Islanders, get cracking!), which is awesome!

It was a lot of fun hanging out with you folks, and we hope you’ll all stop by again soon!