REVIEW: I Paid $95 for Afternoon Tea at Disney World and I Have THOUGHTS

We’ve had some great experiences so far at The Cake Bake Shop in Disney World so when we saw another exclusive offering was opening up we knew we needed to try it out!

The newest Disney World restaurants opened up to a slew of criticism over its menu prices and offerings so we had to test it out for you. Now that The Cake Bake Shop announced reservations are available for its afternoon tea experience, we had to see if it lived up to the hype we’d expected in comparison to the rest of its meal options.

The Roses of Gold Afternoon Tea at The Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers is truly an experience at Disney World you will have like no other, especially since this is the only afternoon tea experience currently available. The one at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort has not returned since 2020.

Reservations for this dining experience are limited and reservations are recommended. When you book, the meal and gratuity are paid in full at the time of booking. You can book this by phone or by contacting the concierge at The Cake Bake Shop by email and the experience is non-refundable. Since you’re paying for the meal at booking you should also know that adults are $95 and children ages 3-9 are $65. Gluten-free and allergy-friendly bookings can also be prepared in advance and the restaurant requests a 48-hour advance notice of your booking to properly prepare and advise the menu options based on those allergens.

Background

The Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers at Disney’s BoardWalk finally opened its doors recently after a healthy dose of anticipation from curious visitors passing by its construction for years. This elegant establishment offers its diners a luxurious feel to its meals and is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, has an array of dessert options, a relaxing spot for drinks at a table or the bar, and so much more.

As someone who’s visited this restaurant quite a few times since its grand opening, I’m the first to point out that this restaurant radiates elegance! It completely envelopes you from the moment you step foot past its threshold and doesn’t let up until you’ve passed through its doors as you’re leaving. It’s in everything that surrounds you inside from the paint, to the floors, to the design and decor — you’re truly pampered as an honored guest within their doors. And, since my friend Emma and I were stopping by for what we thought was a “spot of tea”, you may be surprised to learn that it turned into one of the most captivating tea parties we’ve ever attended.

Atmosphere

Say what you will about The Cake Bake Shop Restaurant but there’s no denying its opulence — it’s in every detail of the entire restaurant. As you walk through the front doors you’re greeted by a smaller waiting area and a check-in desk…

…but as your host comes around to escort you, you’re walked through the main dining room that’s filled with tons of natural light thanks to the cascading window surrounding the entire restaurant and its dining room sections.

This time we were back for its NEW experience — The Roses of Gold Afternoon Tea at The Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers. The moment you step into The Cake Bake Shop, you’re met with elegance. It’s in the paint, the floors, the designs — everything. During the holiday season, the restaurant was appropriately fitted with furnishings and decor that helped give it a festive touch!

We walked back to the exquisite Garden Room of the restaurant, where we found ourselves at the table greeted by our server who was ready and waiting to explain the afternoon tea experience to us before it unfolded.

As we sat at the table, we were overwhelmed by the attention the restaurant put into the meal. Not only will you find a table setting fit for royalty with a swanky feel, but you’ll also pull out an appropriately soft pink and gold welcome card within your folded napkin welcoming you to your seat.

If you’re looking for a sophisticated experience at Disney World this is certainly a unique take on a classic offering and they’ve really done well to impress quickly from presentation alone!

Food & Drinks

The menu was already at the table for us when we sat down and we had a few minutes to glance through it.

Since you’ve booked a mostly prix fixe meal, the menu is there to outline the offerings, and their contents, and allow you options for whenever the experience calls for it — yes, that’s right OPTIONS! As you begin your meal, your menu will start off with a homemade scone followed by finger sandwiches and patisserie with fresh fruit sprinkled in your tea tower. There’s also a children’s menu list of offerings that mimics a lot of the same offerings as the adult version with a few variations to the sandwiches like Peanut Butter & Raspberry Jam, French Ham & Gruyere, and Turkey & Cheddar.

As you move through the rest of the menu’s pages, you’ll find the vegetarian and pescatarian options, as well as a gluten-free menu. As we mentioned above, you can also request a gluten-free tea experience in advance. We also asked about vegan options for the tea and our server told us that most of what would be served for those dietary restrictions would mostly be salads so that’s definitely something to consider when deciding if this pricey experience is worth it for you.

Shortly after explaining how our experience would flow for the time we were dining our server brought out a sampling of all six teas you can try during your meal. Yes — you heard right, TRY! So a big win for us here was finding out that while you have an option to select a tea to try out initially, you DO have the option to switch it up! This allowed us to relax a bit about our choices and not feel like we were making a very rigid decision without having a bit of a background of what we were ordering and an instant regret.

This tray features samples of each of the teas as your server will allow you to smell them, and tell you a little bit more about what’s built into the making of that particular tea and other guest feedback on its taste — we found this to be immensely helpful and also offered an elevated feel to our experience. If you’re savvy enough to save room throughout your meal, who knows, you may be able to try them all in one sitting!

After we had our out-of-body aromatic experience, we made our selections for a pot of tea each and it was time for our first offering to arrive at the table. The Orange Cranberry Scone was the first dish to appear and right away it looked and smelled divine! It’s also served with a few accompaniments of English clotted cream, The Cake Bake Shop’s Pixie Jelly, and European salted butter.

I speak for both of us when we say we ate and left no crumbs — this dessert was incredible, and that’s hard to say about a scone. Emma and I both expected it to be small and rock hard but what we got was larger like a sugar-coated flaky turnover that had mixed in cranberries and a soft, buttery interior that melted in your mouth.

Now add one or more of the accompanying spreads on your piece as you take a bit and your taste buds will be sent into a flavor overload. It really wanted to mimic a buttery buttermilk biscuit texture but looked almost like a flaky pastry when you first cut into it. The outside is completely coated in a thick, sugar coating almost like icing on a doughnut and we seriously couldn’t gobble these scones down fast enough. Delicious was an understatement!

If that was our first “taste” of this experience, we really got excited when our teas were brought out to the table. When we ordered, we were allowed a max of 2 teapots at the table at a time with the ability to switch out our flavor at any time for no additional cost. Between us, we opted for the L’Oriental and Carcadet Nuit D’été, but we’ll break them down for you one at a time.

Starting with the L’Oriental this was the restaurant’s version of a green tea with fruity aromas of passion fruit, bush peach, and wild strawberry. This one we both found light, bright, and very spot on for a familiar green tea taste with a slightly fruity twist. It was really herbaceous right at your nose as you’re lifting it closer to sip.

The flavor really livened up when we added fresh honey to sweeten it up a bit!

We tried the Carcadet Nuit D’été next. This was one our server explained was more of a berry mix of flavors and he couldn’t have been more spot on. This one is made of hibiscus flowers, apple pieces, rosehip peel, raspberry, strawberry, and creamy aromas. It’s also one of two decaf options for teas during the meal along with the Menthe Poivrée.

Wow — you couldn’t have made a more spot-on fruity tea than this one! It was exactly as described and even had a bit of a tangy taste to the backend. It was similar to biting into an apple but that’s what we really enjoyed about it. It’s got a lovely burgundy color to it and while the tartness wasn’t strong, it was noticeable so if you’re looking to dress it up, add a fresh slice of lemon to that cup or taper it down a bit sweeter with a bit of honey or sugars from your table.

Once we’d had some time to take a few sips of tea and wash down the remnants of the scone, it was time for our tea tower to appear! This thing looks like it was pulled out of a Disney princess storybook and we almost didn’t want to touch it because it was just so beautiful!

It comes layered with 3 tiers separating different treats and eats for the rest of your afternoon tea. The top tier features tea cakes, macarons, and a chocolate truffle…

…while the middle tier features patisseries and bars…

…and your third tier down holds all of the finger sandwiches.

There’s a lot going on to these tiers and don’t you worry because we’re breaking it all down for you! Let’s start from the bottom up, shall we? We need a little sustenance to keep us going.

The finger sandwiches are what we set our sights on first! We were served four sandwiches each of Egg Salade, Chicken Salade, Norwegian Smoked Salmon, and Herbed Goat Cheese with Thinly Sliced Cucumber.

The Egg Salade was a dream. It was very light thanks mostly to the egg pieces and light mayo with a few bits of celery and we found it to be a bit on the peppery side. Not anything spicy, but just enough to know that it was there to some degree. The Chicken Salade was probably our collective favorite. Our server warned us that there have been folks known to order tubs of it to take home and we could easily see why with just one bite. There were a lot of chicken pieces inside, creamy mayo, and fresh grapes sliced into the sandwich with tiny pieces of celery. The Norwegian Smoked Salmon was equally as good. Since it was so thinly sliced it kept its smokiness to the taste, but in texture more closely mimicked a shaved meat instead of a fishy taste but it also was very creamy and smooth texturally aside from the salmon. The cucumber salad had an incredible crunch to it and the herbed goat cheese was wonderfully balanced with the fresh snap of each of the cucumber pieces in each bite. Together they were very delicious and we could easily have saved room for more of them.

Moving on the the treats we started off with a few bites of popular bars from the restaurant and bakery. There’s a Lemon Bar, a Magic Bar, and a Blackberry Jam Crumble Bar on this tier of your tea tower.

All of these bars are bite size so you can pop them in as a whole (like I did) or take them in a few bites (like Emma opted to do). Starting with the Blackberry Jam Crumble Bar this one was decent but admittedly not a favorite for either of us. The bottom was a buttery crumble that was topped with a fruity, sweet blackberry and topped with crunchy nuts that added a bit more of sweeter texture to the mix. The lemon bar for us was a bit divisive and we narrowed that down to just being a difference in taste to our preferences. While I normally like sweet lemon flavors with just a hint of tartness, this one tasted a bit like it came out of the dishwasher to me at first bite. After I got a bite in I was able to get past that and on to the more dense lemon bar that was creamy and zesty but Emma loved it from the first bite and found it to be very bright and not overpowering. The Magic Bar for both of us was a bit middle of the road too (and this is one I had previously raved about). We’re both willing to bet that because the restaurant was cooler inside than when I took my first one outside. It was just harder to break into and not as soft. We still loved the graham cracker base and thought the toppings between the butterscotch, coconut, walnuts, and chocolate chips were an interesting mix and the glitter on top helped give it a nice touch.

We’re coming into the home stretch of our meal — can you feel it?! Last on our tea tower were the top treats! This lovely section held two macarons (one Rose-flavored and one Raspberry Champagne-flavored), tea cakes, and a chocolate truffle.

The tea cakes were just as moist and fluffy as the cake slices we’ve had here. They had a fruity undertone to them but that was probably enhanced by the raspberry jam that topped the cakes. The icing on top was very light and more of a whipped consistency than that of a traditional buttercream. The chocolate truffle had a mix of milk chocolate and white chocolate flavors that worked together to blend out the creamy truffle mixture inside the harder shell coating. It almost reminded us of a less messy version of a Cadbury cream-filled egg. The macarons included in our tea tray came in two different flavors. The blush pink one was Rose flavored and very much lived up to its name with its floral accents and the deeper pink was Raspberry Champagne flavored which leaned more into the raspberry flavor. Both of them were great macarons that held up really well when we bit into them and they had a surprise spot of jelly in the center.

After all that we needed another round of tea to wash down everything we had just devoured so we ordered another pot of tea each with different flavors than before! This round we opted for the Anichaï and Breakfast Blend. Anichaï was described to us as “Christmas in a cup” and we knew we had to try it before we left. It’s a black tea flavored with ginger, cloves, red berries, and cardamom.

This was exactly as we would have imagined it and all of the spices worked together to deliver a well-pouted treat to our taste buds. It had all the hints of cinnamon and spice without the additional fruitier hints and we were able to sweeten it to our liking so easily!

The Breakfast Blend is a black tea blend of Ceylon, Darjeeling, and Assam teas. And it’s truly a version of tea you would easily spring for first thing in the morning.

It’s more of a standard version of traditional tea but with an elevated feel to it. This is why we really enjoyed this one as well because it didn’t need a lot of bells and whistles to pull off the taste it was trying to achieve.

Magic or Tragic?

Now it’s time to rate this meal and experience as Magic or Tragic and while we’re both in agreement on it, we think it will come down to a matter of personal preference. There’s no denying this meal comes with a hefty price tag but aside from the food we found you’re also paying for the experience and service you receive here.

If you’re someone who’s looking for a top-notch experience like no other at Disney World and really have a special occasion that warrants the price, we say it’s worth the try so it gets a Magic rating from us. Sure, there are going to be those who consider themselves aficionados and would love to make a “just because” booking for this meal to dine at the restaurant and see how it compares to other afternoon teas they’ve enjoyed.

However, if you’re really looking for a fuller meal and being called by name at your table isn’t totally your style, you might not enjoy this experience as much as someone else who would place value on those touches more than just how filling the meal is. As we said before, we really liked the ability to order as many teas as we wanted and switch out the flavors giving you the chance to try them all but we both agreed for a return to an experience like this one, it would be over something very special.

We’re constantly reviewing the newest experiences at Disney World and updating some of our older reviews each week! Be sure to stay tuned with us at AllEars as we bring you the most updated info as we have it.

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Are you most interested in The Cake Bake Shop Restaurant’s breakfast, dinner, or afternoon tea? Tell us which experience you’re leaning toward in the comments below!

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