What’s it to be? A glossy red ‘chubby heart’ cake filled with the lightest of chocolate mousse? A slice of celadon-green and primrose-yellow Battenberg?

A ‘cartwheel’, her luxurious take on good old Wagon Wheels? What about a plate of those little biscuits exquisitely iced with edible first-class stamps?

I am with Anya Hindmarch, 52, handbag designer to the stars, at her newly opened Anya’s Cafe, trying to choose. It seems a shame to actually eat one. Just as so many of her bags look good enough to eat so, it seems, her cakes look good enough to wear.

I plump for a vegan coconut and banana loaf — delicious and not as worthy as it sounds.It’s gone in 60 seconds flat — with a little help from Anya.

Wait, though. What is the message here? Since when has anyone in fashion declared Cake Is The New Black? It feels a bit of an oxymoron. Surely cake is precisely what we don’t need if we care about the way we look in our clothes?

Anya, though, always ahead of the curve — remember her I Am Not A Plastic Bag campaign back in 2007 — thinks otherwise.She wants us to stop feeling guilty about indulging ourselves and find the joy in the simpler pleasures of life.

This includes sitting down with each other at an old-fashioned melamine-topped table and sharing a slice of homemade cake, ‘because really, What to give when opening a cafe‘s more pleasurable after lockdown, than that?’

To have her own cake shop has in fact been a long-term dream of Anya’s. A self-confessed sugar fiend, she’s already entertained the idea of opening up an old-fashioned sweet shop too, lined with jars of personal favourites such as Maynards wine gums and strawberry liquorice ‘laces’.

‘Heaven, right?’ she giggles, ‘although perhaps that could be a bit over the top.’

This all fits into Anya’s latest project The Village, a five-strong cluster of shops bang in the centre of London — designed to bring back the idea of community to shopping.The aim is for it not only to be a retail hub but a place where people can interact, as they did before the pandemic and all the subsequent ordering off Amazon.

Along with the cafe (which is also a restaurant — you can get wine, salad and Welsh rarebit, too), there is a shop selling her 100 per cent recycled products.

Another outlet sells products stemming from her obsession with labelling and organisation.(Her brother once bought her a Dymo gun as a birthday gift and Opening gift shop in Ho Chi Minh City she jokes she would even label her children with it if she could.)