Monthly Archives: August 2015

Simmone Logue, Cammeray

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

5/450-476 Miller St, Cammeray, New South Wales
www.simmonelogue.com.au

This is one of two stores for the small baking and catering company started by the eponymous Simmone. It’s a trendy upmarket cafe with plenty of mouth-watering goodies, including gourmet salads, savoury pastries, quiches, fancy sandwiches, cakes, tarts, slices, and so on. They also apparently do a dinner service with full cooked meals in the evenings.

Simmone Logue

But I’m here for the sausage roll and vanilla slice. I order them to eat in on one of the chunky rustic wooden tables that looks like you could butcher a side of beef on it. The sausage rolls (as well as the pies) are not kept hot – they are more designed for people to pick up on the way home and reheat at home. But they are happy to heat one up for eating in. While I wait for my order, I admire the country kitchen decorations, including a large set of bookshelves overflowing with well-thumbed recipe books, and vintage French vegetable and flower seed packets in cutesy frames hanging on the wall. It seems these are for sale.

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Vina Bakehouse, Chatswood

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

Level 2, Westfield Shopping Centre, Chatswood

This bakery lives in a food court in the giant Westfield shopping complex in Chatswood, wedged between a cafe and an Asian noodle place. It sells freshly baked bread and a selection of cakes, tarts, and slices, as well as pies and sausage rolls. I’ve been here a few times before and don’t have a particularly high opinion of their bread items. I once bought a “bagel” here, only to discover that it was nothing more than a fluffy white bread roll in a very rough and ready approximation of a shape with a hole through it.

Vina Bakehouse

But being in the area around lunch time, I decided to take the plunge. I procured a sausage roll and a vanilla slice and took a seat at one of the food court tables nearby to examine and taste. An elderly lady and what I presume to be her granddaughter sat at the table with some lunch of their own as well, and the girl looked at me curiously as I photographed and considered my meal.

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Soul with Zest, Angaston

cafe, country, sa, vanilla slice

37 Murray Street, Angaston, South Australia

This is really a cafe doing breakfasts and light meals throughout the day, not a bakery. However they had a very interesting looking vanilla slice sitting in the cake counter, so I took the plunge and added one to my breakfast order of muesli with fruit and milk.

Soul with Zest

I was attracted by the different appearance. This slice had three layers of pastry, with custard filling the gap between the lower two, and an equally thick layer of what looked like whipped cream or buttercream between the upper two. The whole was topped with a thick glossy layer of light brown icing decorated with white and darker brown diagonal lines.

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The Pie Tin, Newtown

cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, special

1-1a Brown St, Newtown, New South Wales
thepietin.com.au

I’d been wanting to visit this place ever since I first heard about it. They do a big line in pies, as one might expect from the name – both the savoury, meaty Australian sort, and sweet dessert types. The establishment is tucked away in a little side street off Newtown’s bustling King Street restaurant and university student shopping strip. If you didn’t know it was here, you’d probably never notice it unless you are a local to the area.

The Pie Tin

On a sunny winter Sunday I sought out the address and ventured into the old brick building, painted a neat light grey on the outside. The interior is funky and modern, with two large display cases arranged at right angles. The right one contains hot savoury pies of several different varieties, while the left contains sweet pies. Some of the hot pies on offer include: steak, cheese, and smokey bacon; lamb and rosemary; smokey beef brisket and mushroom; Sicilian style chilli lovers sausage and white bean; creamy chicken with hot seeded mustard and mushrooms; vegetable and lentil; sweet roasted duck with Cointreau and seasonal vegetables. While the sweet section has: Black Forest meringue; whipped lime; brown butter pecan; American style pumpkin; banoffee; creamy coconut custard; lemon brulee; Mississippi mud; and “the apple pie that ate Newtown” – an apple pie roughly the size of a car tyre, I kid you not.

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