Brick Lane's Lip Lickers, like donuts, are sweet treats with a hole

Lip Lickers is the risqué name for the hot donuts stand parked at the entrance to the Sunday UpMarket at the Old Truman Brewery, off Brick Lane (see map).  The too-hot-to-handle donuts, fresh off the donut fryer’s conveyor belt and powdered with icing sugar, were too raw for my taste. “I agree,” said Oren, the man behind Lip Lickers. “But people prefer them that way.”

To his credit, Oren offered me another bag of Lip Lickers fried to a darker shade even though I’d managed to polish off the first bag, raw or not.

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World Barista Champ rolls coffee cart into London men's shop

For now there is no better time to meet 2009 World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies and try one of his espresso drinks than the Present. That's the name of the fashionable menswear shop in London's Shoreditch district (140 Shoreditch High Steet – see map) in which he’s set up a coffee trolley. In this relaxed setting there is time for him to chat and get better acquainted with the prized but fiddly Nuova Simonelli lever-operated piston espresso machine he won at the WBC.

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