Hull Spotlight: The English Muse

I am loving doing this little Hull series on my blog. I get an excuse to visit all my favourite places, it feels pretty darn good to promote local businesses and I also love sharing those places with people who might not have heard of them before. It's also making me realise that, despite the bad rep, Hull is a pretty grand place to live #whatababe (if a city can be a babe). You can find my first two Hull spotlight posts here and here.

Next on the list is one of my favourite coffee and cake haunts - The English Muse on Newland Avenue. I feel really lucky to live close to Newland Avenue because there are so many lovely and unique little places down there. The English Muse is a cute little cafe with heaps of personality, indulgent coffee and the yummiest cake (that I can't have now that I'm sugar free - sob). What more could you want?

Update: The English Muse is now known as The Artisan and is under new ownership, however it's still as cute and tasty as ever!

Let's talk about the interiors first because even though it's the coffee that really matters, it's always nice to sit somewhere pretty too isn't it? The English Muse has a real cosy feel to it with comfy chairs, fresh flowers on each table and old mismatched crockery for you to drink from. It's the type of place you can spend hours in because it's just so enjoyable to relax in and I always imagine it as the type of place I'll drink coffee and blog from when I finally buy a new laptop. It's also one of my favourite places to go to catch up with friends. There are so many personal and unique touches in this cafe that I hardly know where to start. There's art displayed on the walls, vintage looking lamps and cushions galore. I didn't get a picture from the outside because I'm a bad blogger, but there are fairy lights leading up to the door and it's one of those interesting looking old buildings that makes you wonder what it used to be (I'm afraid I don't know). They also have all their afternoon tea stands displayed, which again are all mismatched and patterned and just so Instagrammable (which is a word I've started using as a synonym for pretty).

I'm sure you can see how pretty the interiors are from the pictures, although there's so much more to it that I didn't manage to capture or do justice. What you can't tell from the pictures though is how great the coffee is. My favourite drink to have here is the dirty chai, which is a chai latte with honey and cinnamon. They do so many different drinks and in summer they do the tastiest range of iced teas - the three mint one is my personal fave and in fact my mouth is watering just thinking about it and I'm going to have to drink some water before I carry on with this post.

OK so I actually just went and made myself a homemade iced mint tea, which has massively failed because I just put ice in some mint tea and all that's happened is it's melted and I still just have hot mint tea. Please tell me your iced tea secrets, English Muse.

Now, I no longer eat the cake, at least until they start making it sugar free (please English Muse?), but I have eaten plenty of it in the past and can confirm that it's delicious. All the cakes are homemade, they come in gigantic portions (never a bad thing) and they also do gluten free cakes. My personal favourite is (well, was *crying face*) the carrot cake. There's just the right ratio of cake to icing, whereas usually I find with carrot cake that there's too much icing and it's so - dare I say it - moist. As well as cake, you also get a proper biscuit with your coffee/tea and by proper I mean a bourbon biscuit or custard cream, which I think is the nicest touch rather than one of those bulk bought ones in a wrapper. In fact, The English Muse was where I ate my accidental biscuit that I spoke about in my post about giving up sugar (here).

This place is a definite must visit if you're in Hull. Have you ever been to The English Muse?

Amy x