Best in glass: a peek at our Café Tea Room windows

At Bettys we always make sure to keep our silver teapots sparkling and our cake trollies stocked with everyone’s favourites, but the finishing touch for any of our six Café Tea Rooms is a window display good enough to devour. Although they’re best peered at in person – ideally shortly before heading into the café for a treat – we also love sharing our most creative and colourful displays online. Wherever you are, we hope they brighten up your day.

Long before Facebook and Instagram, Bettys windows in days gone by were still the talk of the town. After opening his second café in Bradford a few years previously, in 1928 our founder Frederick Belmont enchanted visitors to the city’s Shopping Week with a set of spectacular windows showcasing the very best chocolate and confectionery craft that Bettys had to offer.

One window had as its centrepiece chocolate gnomes sitting in a waggon drawn by donkeys – chocolate ones, naturally. The whole arrangement weighed more than 18kg. Another was inspired by the Swiss mountain settings of Frederick’s youth, with the gnomes among toadstool houses handcrafted from sugar. This wonderfully whimsical scene won a gold medal at that year’s Universal Cookery and Food Exhibition in London.

Easter has always given us more excuse than we need to let our imaginations run wild. In recent years our chocolatiers and confectioners have filled café windows with a host of springtime delights, crafting chocolate tree trunks surrounded by squirrels and owls, or farms with marzipan animals. But you may also have been stopped in your tracks by the sight of the HMS Betty, complete with marzipan sails. Or perhaps you remember spotting our eggs in the company of a circus big top with acrobats, Noah’s Ark or even a medieval Bavarian castle with wizards and princesses (but alas, no gnomes)?

Of course, our 2019 centenary celebrations called for a display that would have truly made Frederick proud. So we paid tribute to his artistry by recreating one of his own pieces: an exquisite sugarwork cottage, complete with pink rambling roses. Our cake decorating team were only just getting started, however, and for the Christmas windows they stunned us all with scale model versions of all six Bettys cafés that were perfect in every piped and hand-painted detail – right down to the miniature window displays.

For this year's Christmas window, we returned to our roots. The centrepiece is a Swiss chalet made from icing and sugarpaste, with hints of the 'coquille d’oeuf' patterns that feature on our Christmas packaging. Our founder, Frederick Belmont, was born in Switzerland, and Bettys is still very much a blend of the Alps and the Dales. This year we weren't able to do an unveiling event, as has become tradition, because of social distancing rules. So instead we filmed it for you. Watch it below.