Project Canelé, Edinburgh

If you’ve been out and about in Edinburgh’s cafes in the last wee while, you’ll have seen them. Maybe they’re front and centre on the counter, or maybe they’ve been on a little plate sat next to someone’s coffee. They tend to move in packs, geometrically arranged and always catching the light. This is the canelé; a squat, ridged little cake with a varnished mahogany exterior and a powerful aura.

Can a small, brown cake have an aura? They do seem to have a way of drawing you in; it must be the fact that they usually turn up in perfect uniform rows, all the same but each one unique in its craggly, shiny way. They look hefty, like they have their own very faint gravitational field. They look well-crafted, like a set of caramelised Lewis Chessmen. They look, and we mean this as a compliment, like they would be really fun to throw.

Those Edinburgh canelés are the project of the aptly-named Project Canelé, but the cake itself comes from the French tradition of finding ever-more-interesting ways to combine fat, flour, sugar and eggs together. Big bags of flour and sugar are among the main ornamentations at PC’s new cafe at the foot of Dundas Street. It’s a very minimal look and a very restrained colour palette, save for the glinting racks of copper canelé tins which lurk behind the till. There was a giant, sculpted wooden canelé on our first visit, but not on our second, and the phrase ‘did we imagine a giant wooden canelé?’ is the kind of question that just raises more questions so let’s assume it’s through the back for a fresh coat of varnish.

The exterior of the canelé (£3.25) is that dark, crunchy crust we mentioned earlier, but inside is a different story. It’s a soft, custard-like centre with a light chewiness and a very faint gooeyness. Not too sweet, but with plenty of vanilla to balance out the caramelised outer; soft without veering into floppy. It’s all very, very well-balanced. The craggly crust, the soft lumpen inner, the richness, the lightness; these canelés are genuinely delicious. It’s no wonder they’re turning up everywhere.

For the canelé agnostics who’ve somehow ended up in a cafe with that name above the door, there are other choices. If you want to keep it sweet, try the chouqettes (£3.25) – a small pile of soft, airy choux pastry nuggets flecked with chunks of sugar, these lads will not put up a fight. If you’re feeling decadent, get a slice of flan patisier (£4.95), the canelé’s rambunctious older cousin who kicks in the door and starts wobbling around all over the place. It’s a sweet, squishy, smooth egg custard tart, and the slices are frankly enormous. Lovely shine on the lad as well; can’t quite see your reflection in the lightly burnished top, but you’ll get closer than you’d expect.

The savoury options are solid as well. A ham and mustard sandwich (£8) is very nicely balanced – the focaccia-like bread is great, there are many, many pickles to pick your way through, and it avoids the surprisingly-easy-to-fall-into sarnie trap of ‘putting the wrong amount of stuff in the sandwich’. There is a good number of complementary ingredients in here, but they all stay inside the ride at all times.

The coffee is great – a flat white (£3.60) made with beans from Artisan Roast is smooth and solid, as is its delightful ceramic cup. What’s that on the underside of the cup? Oh you know that it’s a little drawing of a canelé. Because at the end of the day, this place is all about the canelé: a scrappy, sweet, chewy, gooey handheld treat that combines loads of the elements that make cake great into one tennis ball-sized block. Trust us, you haven’t seen the last of these little guys.

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150 Dundas St, Edinburgh, EH3 5DQ; Wed-Sun 9am-3pm
@projectcanele on Instagram