Category Archives: bakery

Bakehouse South Coogee, South Coogee

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

142 Malabar Rd, South Coogee, New South Wales
www.bakehousesc.com.au

A sunny late autumn morning is perfect for a morning tea, and for exploring new bakeries. We took a drive over to Coogee and continued south to the Bakehouse South Coogee, which sits on a traditional corner store site surrounded by residential properties, and right across the street form the sprawling old Randwick Cemetery, which is situated on a gentle hillside with wonderful views.

Bakehouse South Coogee

The bakehouse is busy, with plenty of locals popping in for a coffee and a croissant or something a bit more substantial. Besides bread and pasties, the bakers do an impressive line in cakes, with a couple of dozen mouth-watering varieties all on display. One is an amazing looking multi-colour iced rainbow cake, which is also available by the slice, sitting right next to the huge vanilla slices.

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Glenorie Bakery, Glenorie

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

930 Old Northern Rd, Glenorie NSW
www.glenoriebakery.com.au

Glenorie sits an hour or so’s drive from Sydney, in the rural northwestern region that seems to have escaped rampant suburbanisation and remains a haven for people who prefer a slower pace of life, wide open fields, and properties large enough to raise horses on. Amidst the small clusters of villages that exist to support this lifestyle sits the shopping region of Glenorie, with a supermarket and a handful of small stores selling scented soaps, hand made rag dolls, and antiques. And amongst these is the Glenorie Bakery, which seems to be a modern building but constructed in the style of a century old woolshed.

Glenorie Bakery

Walking inside reveals an expansive interior space, filled with all manner of antique farming, baking, and retail equipment. The decor is “1900s farmhouse”, and rust appears to be the decorating material of choice. There’s an old… plough or something hanging from the ceiling, wooden wagon wheels reclining against the walls, and sheafs of wheat decorating large rustic wooden shelves containing enough knick-knacks to stock a large antique shop or rural museum. There are some large dough mixing machines which look like they were retired some time before the Second World War.

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Stone’s Patisserie, Berrima

bakery, cafe, country, nsw, sausage roll

11 Old Hume Hwy, Berrima, New South Wales
www.stonespatisserie.com.au

The little town of Berrima sits just off the Hume Highway south of Sydney, perfectly positioned for a day trip or a stop on the way to Canberra. And a pleasant stop it is, with several interesting shops full of knick-knacks and places to eat and drink. One of those places is Stone’s Patisserie, which is run by a skilled pastry chef. Besides a luscious looking array of cakes and pastries, the premises has cafe tables and light meals. These meals include pies and sausage rolls.

Stone's Patisserie

The sausage roll I ordered looks astonishing, with an intricate latticework of pastry covering the whole thing, dripping with a rich golden brown egg wash in the crevices. This indeed looks like the construction of someone who has mastered the art of pastry. But have they mastered the art of the sausage roll? The physical construction is shortish but very fat, thick stubby cylinder more like a drinking glass than the more familiar longer skinny shape. It looks gorgeous. But how will it hold up on taste?

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Pasticceria Beffa, Airolo

bakery, cafe, overseas, vanilla slice

Via S. Gottardo, 6780 Airolo, Switzerland

Driving through the Alps from Switzerland to Italy, we passed through a number of small towns. As lunch time loomed, we stopped at the town of Airolo to look for some food. Not much was open, but we found a panetteria and pasticceria called Beffa. Being southern Switzerland, this was an Italian-speaking region. After some halting words with a young lady who didn’t speak any English, we managed to get some panini, freshly made in a back room. And sitting in the pastry display was a set of millefoglie, the Italian version of a vanilla slice.

Pasticceria Beffa

We got a small round table in the dimly lit cafe section of the pasticceria. An adjacent table held five elderly men who were drinking espressos and having an animated discussion in Italian. This was the sort of place where old men gather to while away the hours gossiping with their friends. After eating our sandwiches, I turned my attention to the millefoglie presented on a similarly aged plate.

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Gumnut Patisserie, Bowral

bakery, country, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

Grand Arcade, 7 Bong Bong St, Bowral, New South Wales
gumnutpatisserie.com.au

On a leisurely weekend drive through New South Wales’ Southern Highlands region, we stopped for lunch in Bowral, the town where Don Bradman grew up, and famous for the Bradman Oval and Bradman Museum. But in recent years, Bowral has become notable for a different, and culinarily oriented reason.

Gumnut Patisserie

It is the home of the Gumnut Patisserie, established in 1995, and quick to win an impressive list of honours. It won the Baking Association of Australia award for best patisserie in New South Wales in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2012, and 2013. And as the comma at the end of the list on their window shows, they seem determined to win it again in the future. Not only this, but in 2015 they won the grand prize at the Sydney Royal Easter Agricultural Show for Best Vanilla Slice. Clearly this is a place we cannot ignore.

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Oaks Avenue Patisserie, Dee Why

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

9 Oaks Avenue, Dee Why, New South Wales
facebook.com/Oaks-Avenue-Patisserie-9-Oaks-avenue-Dee-Why-NSW-181289418550820/

On a leisurely weekend drive to the beach suburb of Dee Why, we popped into Oaks Patisserie for an afternoon snack and cuppa. This is a small bakery on a somewhat dingy old retail strip just around the corner from the busy Pittwater Road, so the ambience is not great. Inside, however, is a mouth-watering array of cakes and pastries, which look colourful and artfully assembled. I ordered a sausage roll and vanilla slice and they were delivered by staff to one of the two outside tables for us to contemplate.

Oaks Avenue Patisserie

The sausage roll looks promising enough at first sight, with golden flaky pastry and ever so slightly burnt bits on the ends. However, on the first bite a different experience is revealed. The pastry is a little on the dry side, not greasy or buttery at all. The pastry case has pulled away from the meat filling, leaving a hollow space in between, but pastry is actually middling to okay.

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Patisserie Valerie, Chiswick, London

bakery, city, overseas, vanilla slice

318 Chiswick High Street, Chiswick, London, UK
www.patisserie-valerie.co.uk/cafe-chiswick.aspx

On a business trip to London, I was staying in the Chiswick area for a few days. My explorations of the Chiswick High Street on foot uncovered the delicious looking Valerie Patisserie, which enticed with a window display full of luscious cakes and pastries, crowned by a huge piece of decorative frilliness rendered in dark and white chocolate. Amongst the mouth-watering cakes and slices in the window was a neat row of milles-feuilles, looking for all the world like classic Aussie vanilla slices, complete with the traditional drawn brown icing lines on a top of white icing.

Patisserie Valerie

I discovered this early in the day, on a post-breakfast walk before a day full of business meetings, and had already bought a more robust scone from a nearby bakery to serve as morning tea. So I filed the shop away in memory, to return that evening after the work had been completed for the day and buy one of the slices to take back to my hotel after dinner for dessert. The price was £2.95, and for that the lady behind the counter, rather than tossing it in a brown paper bag as would happen back home, placed it in a neat cardboard box emblazoned with the logo of the patisserie, using no less than three logo stickers to seal the box. This was then carefully lowered into a paper carry bag with handles, again decorated with the shop’s logo.

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Pie in the Sky, Cowan

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll

1296 Pacific Hwy, Cowan, New South Wales
pieintheskycowan.com.au

The Pie in the Sky is a bit of a legendary pie shop, operating for almost 30 years on a site on the old Pacific Highway, a winding two-lane road that used to be the only way to travel north of Sydney before the opening of the F3 freeway. The place is nestled on top of a cliff overlooking the freeway below, and across a vast panorama of eucalypt forest in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, across to the Hawkesbury River.

Queue at Pie in the Sky

It’s a favourite weekend hangout for motorcycle riders and vintage and sports car drivers, who prefer the scenery and thrills of the old road over the bland freeway. We arrived at lunch time on a Sunday, to find the car park area almost full to overflowing with motorbikes and fancy cars. Fortunately we located a spot that must have just been vacated, and joined the queue, a good 40 people long, to buy our lunch.

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The Corso Bakehouse, Manly

bakery, city, nsw, vanilla slice

3/1A The Corso, Manly, New South Wales

After filling up on the amazing sausage roll around the corner at Infinity Bakery, I had to make a bit of a trek in search of a vanilla slice for dessert. Not too far, fortunately, for on the western end of The Corso lies The Corso Bakehouse, a typical old style Aussie bakery with a store front and a counter, selling cakes, slices, pies, and freshly baked bread, as well as drinks from a fridge emblazoned with a Coca Cola logo. No cafe seating here, but they do have a line in fresh sandwiches to take away, with an Asian twist that includes pork rolls.

The Corso Bakehouse

In the large glass-fronted display is a huge tray of classic looking vanilla slices, nestled amidst other tempting looking sweets. The slices have a slightly rustic look, with the white icing scribbled with some very hasty and rudimentary looking brown markings, as though someone knew the classic parenthesis shape that they were supposed to have, but had done it at rapid speed in between checking the ovens.

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Infinity Bakery, Manly

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll

13 Market Lane, Manly, New South Wales

Continuing my quest to check out what are reputed to be some of Sydney’s best bakeries, I made the trek to Manly to try Infinity Bakery. This is a small shop located in the laneway running parallel behind the Corso, Manly’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, so it’s hidden away from much of the tourist foot traffic. The Manly outlet is one of three Sydney locations, with other shops in Paddington and Darlinghurst.

Infinity Bakery

There are a few cafe tables, and a small selection of sandwiches and pastries (no vanilla slice, unfortunately), but mostly they sell loaves and bread rolls. But there’s also a warmer holding a few pies, sausage rolls, and two different types of vegetarian rolls (spinach and feta; and pumpkin, chickpea, and feta).

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