the kid was drawing circles with dots in them the other day (“biscuits!”), when i said, “why don’t you draw a hot cross bun?”. she only paused long enough to look at me like it was a really good idea before she went on to draw bun after bun after bun. three pages of them in fact, until she got bored and wandered off. illustrated food blog? it’s a cinch!
how is it easter already? well, ok, only good friday, but it was only last friday that i discovered the hot cross loaf at bourke street bakery and promised that i would return for it. by wednesday, it struck me that it was only a couple days away from the easter weekend, and after that… who knew if hot cross loaves would still be baked. after all, bourke street bakery is not a link in a chain of franchise bakeshops who churn out hot cross buns all year ’round.
after an obligatory hour spent with the ducks, geese, pelican and playground at victoria park, we arrived at the bakery on the stroke of lunchtime. i had never registered before if it was set up to eat in; other times i had only stood just inside the narrow doorway for as long as it took to order a takeaway loaf or tart. but yes, there is a single corner table, which might seat four snugly, and if you have an extraordinarily long torso, there are also three stools at a counter mounted so high up the wall that it came up to my chin.
all seating will be free if you arrive at an early hour as we did, but if you spend too many minutes trying to choose what you might like to eat (as i did), the corner table with the sensible seating will be taken, and you will be forced to perch on one of the bar stools. when maeve sat down, the counter was t h i s far above her head.
but so, the choice, enormous! i knew there were delicious sausage rolls (a few years ago i had the lamb, harissa, almond and currant one, and this time, eyeing the pork and fennel — there is also a chicken option — i went with the lamb again. the pastry so flaky and buttery! the filling so flavoursome and crunchy with chopped nuts!), but there is also pizza (ready-made, cut into slabs) and panini (the kid chose roast pork with coral lettuce and mayonnaise on a herby-oniony roll).
by the end of lunch, we had migrated to the corner table after the original inhabitants vacated, and there was a good two thirds of pork sandwich leftover for my lunch the next day. also, maeve had endeared herself to the countergirl to the extent that she offered me anything in the window in exchange for the child. my eyes darted to the chocolate tart, but in the end, i paid my $5.50 for a hot cross loaf and we skipped outside to the bus stop where we waited quite a bit over half an hour for the every-20-minutes service back home.
earlier in the day, in the treasure trove that is the discount-stickered upstairs shelvery of gleebooks, i had found “candyfreak“, which is self-explanatory, really, and an appropriate read for the choc fest that is the easter holidays. [of course, you could argue that chocolate is not really candy, that it is a whole different (and better) entity, which it is, but yeah, maybe next time.] there is a front-cover endorsement from amy sedaris, and a blurb about the author, steve almond, being “the dave eggers of food writing”, and the dust jacket itself mimics the silvery foil of a candy bar wrapper, so clearly this book (published in 2004, two copies left at gleebooks, $14.95 reduced from $44) is like, waaay cool. we shall see; i’m only up to chapter two, and steve is still talking a bit more about himself than about candy… and i never really could get into dave eggers anyway. but i have skipped ahead, just right now, and there is a visit to the necco factory, whose outlet store annex in boston i visited with my obliging sister several years ago.
[ sighs wistfully ]
we pass like ships in iChat.
