Wagamama White Chocolate + Ginger Cheesecake

Wagamama white chocolate and ginger cheesecake costs £8.20 and carries 487 kcal, one of only four desserts with a published price and the list's most conventional pleasure. Creamy cheesecake on a biscuit base with a zingy ginger twist, toffee sauce and a ginger icing sugar dusting.

The ginger is the difference between this and every high street cheesecake beside it: warmth and bite cutting through white chocolate's uncomplicated sweetness, the pairing gingerbread taught the world, here run cold and creamy. The biscuit base does its structural duty and the toffee sauce rounds the plate toward comfort.

The numbers read indulgent and unashamed: 487 kcal with the dessert page's highest fat at 30 g, white chocolate and cream cheese being what they are, and sugar at 35 g mid table. Dairy through and through, this is one of the page's few emphatically non vegan entries, which for cheesecake loyalists is rather the point.

At £8.20 published, the how much is the cheesecake answer needs no asterisk, a small mercy on this page of estimates. Against the smoked chocolate cake at nearly the same figure the choice is cream against cocoa, gentle spice against smoke.

The slice also serves a quiet structural role on the page: it is the dessert for the guest who wants no surprises, the anchor order that lets the rest of the table gamble on bao nuts and smoked chocolate knowing one classic is landing regardless. Every good dessert list keeps one such seat, and this fills it with more character than most.

It follows the spicier mains best, the ginger echoing rather than fighting a firecracker or buldak ending, and it is the dessert for the table member who wanted no adventures after all that. A green tea beside it earns its keep against the richness.