Bourke Street Bakery

Or, the one that taught me to love baking

It started with their tarts. Their tiny, now-shuttered outpost in Chippendale was a 15-minute walk from my university campus — far enough to make it a proper trip that felt just within reach. There was no seating, but that didn’t matter: all I needed was a napkin (or serviette, in Australian) and a small palm-sized chocolate ganache tart.

Sometimes it was a crème brûlée tart, pale custard behind a pane of freckled caramel glass. I thought frangipane was a tropical flower (it’s frangipani, mate) until I tried one of their seasonal tarts, brimming with tender almond meal and studded with stewed fruit.

From left: meringue, crème brûlée, lemon curd, and chocolate ganache tarts. From the Bourke Street Bakery website. Sadly and inexplicably, their New York outpost does not sell their tarts.

After graduating from design school, I bought their cookbook and seriously considered going to culinary school to become a pastry chef (I moved to San Francisco and went to advertising school instead). The recipes are not easy, and I’ve made plenty of overworked, tough pâte brisée. But it cemented my love of the craft: pushing soft pebbles of butter into flour, the small movements of pushing dough into tins, gently melting chocolate in a bowl over a pot of steaming water.

So much of what awes me about baking and pastry work is that it’s more than the sum of their parts. How critical, precise decisions make for a tender crumb, or that a smooth cool custard and crisp tart shell are just fine individually but become amplified and more delicious when combined. To me, baking is the closest act to sorcery, with aligned elements, crossed fingers, and a sprinkling of powdered sugar.

Oh, I also need to tell you about their carrot cake. The Bourke Street Bakery carrot cake is only carrot cake I’ll eat, because it’s unlike any other carrot cake I’ve ever eaten: a modestly un-American single layer of Neufchâtel cheese frosting between two light cake layers made with meringue, which gives the cake its signature crispy top.

Small carrot and walnut cake from Bourke Street Bakery. I may have requested this several times as a birthday cake when I lived in Sydney.

It’s also a total pain in the ass to make. You have to work very, very quickly and with a delicate hand to retain as much of the air in the batter as possible. Be prepared to wash a lot of bowls. Assembly requires carefully slicing the delicate cake into two even layers without tugging and mangling.

Still — the more I write about this cake, the more I want to clear my calendar and run to the store for carrots and cream cheese. Watching someone devour a slice of cake or half of a tart in one bite, in a sliver of the time it took to bake and assemble (or make the trip out to Surry Hills and back) is my favorite part of all.

These days, you’ll find plenty of bakeries that are more popular, more Instagram-able, and more hip than Bourke Street Bakery. Bakeries that make a more exquisite laminated dough with more adventurous flavors and higher technical precision, usually with tweezers, liquid nitrogen tricks, or a suspiciously handsome French man piping $500 worth of Sicilian pistachios into a Paris Brest. (Why am I being served Cédric Grolet posts on Instagram? Do I want to know?)

But there’s no other neighborhood bakery in the world that I would revisit, again and again. A chocolate tart, a flat white, and a small chair outside if I’m lucky — it feels like going home.