Bourke Street Bakery. - Bourke street bakery: all things sweet: unbeatable recipes from the iconic bakery

From the easiest of foolproof cakes, to the crumbliest of pastries and pies, and the most buttery, flaky croissants and danishes Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet represents years of testing, adapting and refining secret recipes. A companion to the definitive and international bestselling bread bible, Bourke Street Bakery, here at last is the comprehensive guide to baking cakes, sweet pastries, tarts and more, with the Bourke Street twist. Theres a reason this tiny iconic store in a corner of Sydney is now opening kitchens internationally and that reason is irresistibly delicious baking.

Paul Allam and David McGuinness are the chefs, bakers and co-owners of the wildly popular Bourke Street Bakery empire. They opened the doors of their first bakery cafe in Sydney in 2004 and now have eleven Australian stores and a New York venture underway. Bourke Street is more than just a bakery Paul and David are also founders of The Bread and Butter Project, Australias first social enterprise artisan bakery, training refugees in baking and pastry-making, and delivering handmade bread to stores around Sydney.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: SWEETS and TREATS

All Things Sweet has proved to be a sweet journey for us thats extended well beyond the recipes youll try your hand at in this book. Its now ten years since we published our first book, Bourke Street Bakery, and just over ten years since we opened our first little bakery caf on Bourke Street in Sydney. That little corner caf in Surry Hills has now grown to eleven stores scattered around the city. We have baked so many different tarts and cakes, biscuits and breads, pies and sweets over the years that we sometimes joke that our dreams are dusted with flour and flavoured with cinnamon sugar.

As Bourke Street Bakery has grown, so too have our families. Every year there are more little feet padding about, and more cheeky faces craving goodies to satisfy their sweet teeth. We would find ourselves at our childrens birthday parties serving the Bourke Street Bakery classics, such as carrot cake and chocolate tarts, but the kids wanted all things sweet.

So we started experimenting and recreating the handmade treats we all grew up with, but taking them to another level by using the best-quality ingredients and giving them a Bourke Street twist.

We made jam rolls with our own homemade quince jam and doughnuts that burst with Belgian chocolate. My four-year-old son would ask for chocolate honeycomb and Id say: When we have treats, lets make sure they are really, really good. What we make will be filled with the best ingredients and better than anything out of a supermarket packet with ingredients that sound like chemical compounds.

And an unexpected thing happened at these childrens parties: the adults enjoyed the food as much, if not more, than the kids. Even at drop-off parties the parents would be lingering, to sample the sweets. Piles of fluffy marshmallows, chewy nougat, mixed berry jubes, rocky road and meringues all began as requests from our kids and quickly led to parents fighting for space at the party table!

So we put our love into making all things sweet. Some of the best party treats were developed at home, with little hands stirring the mixture and licking the bowl afterwards, and then made it into the daily kitchen at Bourke Street Bakery.

Some of the cakes at the bakery, such as our Persian-inspired love cake and sour-cream butter cake, come around seasonally; others have to be ordered, and many, like the carrot cake and chocolate tart, we serve every day of the year or thered be riots

Now, with this book, you can make them at home yourself, and share them with the people you love. Exactly as youre meant to do with all things sweet.

Whats been happening since our last book?

Over the years, as well as growing both our bakery and our obsession with all things sweet, weve also thrown ourselves into all kinds of other projects. Whats the point of owning your business if you cant have a little fun and space to be creative, and do some good in the world, too? The truth is we do feel that Bourke Street is more than a bakery its our love and our life. We want to put that love into food, but also into other projects.

Some of these side projects have been hugely successful. Others weve had to walk away from because, as passionate, crazy and energetic as we are, there just arent enough hours in the day, right? Because Im an upbeat guy, Ill tell you about the projects that have worked and enriched our lives.

Back in 2011 my wife and I made a trip to an orphanage in Mae Sot on the ThaiMyanmar border, where we spent a couple of weeks teaching a small group of Karen refugee women how to use a little oven the orphanage had acquired. In that way they could start a small business to help the orphanage and provide themselves with a livelihood, so they could look after their own children. When I returned to Australia, I was buzzing with enthusiasm from this experience and I discovered that what we had done was help set up a social enterprise. This was a new word and world for me one that would take over my life for the next five years.

A social enterprise, in short, is a business whose profits go into providing opportunity to those who need it most, or creating a needed social benefit. Luckily, my business partner, David McGuinness, has also always seen Bourke Street as more than a bakery and got right behind what was probably my craziest idea to date to gift our wholesale potential and set up a social enterprise in Sydney, training refugees and asylum seekers in artisanal baking and pastry, known as The Bread & Butter Project.

The Bread & Butter Project is Australias first social enterprise bakery and now I know why! David and I have done this voluntarily, and it has been the most rewarding, but hardest, thing we have ever done. It is now almost three years old and we have a host of graduates who have completed the year-long paid training program and found jobs in the hospitality industry. There are many more in the wings as the social enterprise grows.

The Bread & Butter Project is a strong business with strong social outcomes: the more bread we sell, the more people we can train. We like to see it as a winwin for everyone. As you can imagine, this sideshow has taken over our lives at times. But, if youre thinking about starting a social enterprise just do it. If theres a little corner of your business where you see further potential, why not gift it to help others? You can make the world that little bit better, and you only live once so why not? My only advice would be to try to make it your main game, because you might just find you want to spend all your time on it.

Another project has developed from our obsession with environmental sustainability. We own a Closed Loop environmental waste system, the first business in Australia to do so. All our organic waste is processed through this amazing system and, within 24 hours, is converted into compost that we give away to our customers. The local green thumbs say our Bourke Street Bakery compost is the best around town!