142 Sailors Bay Rd, Northbridge, New South Wales

Just a day after making a special expedition to Newtown for Miss Lilly’s, I had an appointment for my first COVID vaccination in the suburb of Northbridge. Since it was at lunch time, I took the opportunity to stroll around the Northbridge shops after my 15-minute safety rest, and found the High Street Bakery.

This is a bog standard suburban high street bakery, with the usual array of freshly baked loaves, a selection of small cakes and tarts and other sweets, and a pie warmer counter full of pies and sausage rolls.

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159 Ridgecrop Drive, Castle Hill
www.knightsbridgeshoppingcentre.com.au/directory/knights-bakehouse-bakery

Following Scully’s successful Delta Dogs audition and my snack at Shepherd’s Artisan Bakehouse, we went a couple of hours later on a quest for lunch. Searching the Castle Hill area located a suburban bakery that we decided to check out, in a smaller local shopping centre than the massive Castle Towers across the other side of Castle Hill. This was Knights Bakehouse (which also eschewed any apostrophe, in the same way as Davids Cakes, reviewed recently).

Also similarly to Davids Cakes, they had two types of vanilla slice, a traditional yellow custardy one with passionfruit icing, and a “French” vanilla slice, with a more creamy style filling and an icing sugar topping.

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28 Baker Crescent, Baulkham Hills, NSW

During this time of coronavirus restrictions, I was only able to travel a bit by virtue of having to return a borrowed item that was essential to the lender’s business. Having dropped off the item in Baulkham Hills, I checked out the nearest cake shop: David’s Cakes. Or perhaps Davids Cakes, with no apostrophe.

This is a typical suburban cake shop in a small cluster of corner shops amidst a residential area. Online reviews were not the greatest, but I’ll give anything a chance.

Walking in, they had coronavirus distancing spots stuck on the floor.

The place was interestingly decorated and had a bit of character with a collection of antique motoring items on shelves around the walls. A little more interesting than your average cake shop. And the products looked pretty good. Various tarts, flans, and quiches in the first display.

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364 Pacific Highway, Lindfield, New South Wales

It’s been a long time between drinks here at Snot Block & Roll, mostly precipitated by the acquisition a few months ago of Scully, our toy poodle puppy. Raising a puppy limits time available for other activities, alas reviewing sausage rolls and vanilla slices among them! But happily Scully is growing into an adolescent dog and is becoming trained, so it’s easier to take her on trips and to find spare time once more.

On this fine spring day, partly cloudy so not too hot, we ventured forth on an expedition to a small local market at East Lindfield. It was indeed small, but pleasant because it wasn’t the same stallholders who travel around the north Sydney area and can be found at a different local market each weekend. There was a burger van and a stall selling Russian food like blinis and pirogies, but we decided to leave the market and seek out a bakery nearby: Christophe’s Pâtisserie Française at Lindfield proper, a short drive west.

Christophe’s is part of a row of old style narrow shop fronts directly facing the Pacific Highway in its role as the main artery through Lindfield. It’s noisy and there’s nothing but a strip of bitumen footpath between the highway and the shop fronts. But the patisserie invites with a display of delicious looking French pastries in the window and an impressively boastful array of certificates plastering one window with pictures of gold and silver medals. These turn out to be local business awards, so not an especially wide competition, but still, presumably it means there is something worth checking out here.

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Careel Shopping Village, 1 Careel Head Rd, Avalon Beach, New South Wales

Oliver’s Pies is one shop in a tiny “shopping village” consisting of this pie shop, a pizza place, and a chicken and burger joint, on Barrenjoey Road as you head north in Sydney towards Palm Beach. I pulled into the tiny car park (holding about a dozen cars) around 11 am and found that Oliver’s not only makes a wide selection of pies and sausage rolls, but also several sweet treats, including chocolate eclairs, custard tarts, apple pies, and vanilla slices! So naturally the choice from the menu was dictated.

The place was rather popular, even at 11am with plenty of customers pulling up in the car park and picking up a pie. The pie of the day was smoked fish, which sounded intriguing, and I would have tried it had I not been moderately full already from a large breakfast.

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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.

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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