Wise Alistair - Sweet Envy: 100 Recipes from the Grandest Little Bakehouse in Town

CONTENTS

FROM HERE TO THERE

OUR LITTLE CAKE SHOP in Hobart has history. Before it was a travel agent and vegie shop, it was the Gem cake shop, and the oldies still regale us with their tales of Neenish tarts and queen cakes.

The biggest question we are asked is why did we leave New York the Big Apple for Tasmania, the Little Apple? Its simple: here, we could afford to set up, and with a bit of work we can get hold of amazing seasonal produce: morello cherries, figs, mulberries, greengage plums, banana passionfruit and even artichokes, just to name a few Right down to the dairy goods from the north of the state, we get a fantastic array of seasonal produce through backdoor deals and shopside barters. Youd have to be an idiot to not embrace your local people, and share or barter some produce. The days of locavore are over; it is mandatory, not exceptional. Local produce tastes better and is often cheaper.

Our shop is more than a way of generating an income; its our home. Our beautiful daughter Matilda cannot remember life outside the cake shop. She has learnt to walk here, and honed her social skills by bouncing from table to table chatting with customers.

There is no tsunami-wave of punters flowing into our shop; we are off the main tourist strip. We dont stick to some formulated plan, we make whatever we are into at the moment. We are a small team, we make it fresh, and if we run out, we shut shop early. Theres a savoury selection for the regulars, and sometimes I need a sausage roll for lunch too. We make bread on the weekends, as we love toast on our days off. We have added Big Bessie, our ice-cream truck, as our massive expansion. And thats about it.

Most of all, we do not take ourselves too seriously. We are just a simple neighbourhood cake shop. Not a patisserie, because that would make us way too proper, and not a bakery, as we dont bake enough bread probably more a diner-cum-greasy spoon that sells cake. We are somewhere you can take the kids and hang out, or slip by for a few sweeties. If its for an event, chat with Teena and she will whip you up a special cake into any form you can imagine.

IN THE BEGINNING

Teena and I are from families that cook a lot, although reading cookbooks these days, it would now seem essential that a passion for food runs through your veins.

We both started in the same little pastry shop in Hobart, La Cuisine, which is where we met. It was one of the first, and established its reputation long before Hobart turned into a bakery town in which bakers now outnumber the old chippers two to one. The curtain that hung over the upstairs window had a poorly drawn coffee cup on it and was stained from a leaky roof, all the stock was kept upstairs on the narrow, carpeted flour-trodden steps, but it was a good place for a little canoodling.

We competed in pastry competitions as a way to break the monotony; like most youngsters, we felt the grass was always greener somewhere else and we saw it as a way to escape. Young and naive, huh.

I was lucky enough to win a spot on the Australian team for an international leg in Montreal. On the last day of the competition, the judges from all the countries were muttering a few pooh-poohs in my direction, as my attempts at creating fine pastry had not all been too successful. Today was wedding cake day, but somehow I had missed the memo or it had been lost in translation. Most other entrants had spent months training on a single dish and all I had to work with was a few scrappy palette knives. At this point winning was not an option, so I figured if you cannot be famous, be notorious. The judges stared in disbelief as I stuck a dunny (an Aussie outback toilet) on top of my cake, complete with a redback spider, then inscribed country singer Slim Dustys bush psalm upon the cake. The French and Italian judges reeled in horror, but holy mother of god, the last day was the best.

Teena came second in the pastry-making nationals, but because the guy who won was over the age limit for the international round, she won the spot to represent Australia in Seoul. Teena, a much better strategist than I, came in the top ten.

OFF TO THE BIG ISLAND

After exhausting the Hobart scene, it was time to hit the big island, as Tasmanians call the Australian mainland. I took off to Melbourne; Teena followed six months later. It was a hectic time of bouncing around the traps, but after living through a few wine-cellar tantrums and restaurants closing overnight with ill-tempered Frenchmen, I ended up as pastry chef at Circa the Prince, in the Michael Lambie era, while Teena ran the pastry department at The Point restaurant in Albert Park, under the watchful gaze of Ian Curley, his arms full of tattoos as he sipped nothing but champagne.

Circa was amazing. The band room and the Van Handel brothers wide sphere of influence saw a never-ending stream of brilliant after-parties that wed slip through the back door to see although Prince sipping red wine from a glass with a straw seemed less rock n roll than we would have liked. We took any excuse to pretend to check bookings so we could slip by and see a celebrity. Legendary chef David Thompson came to Circa and cooked an exclusive dinner; nobody cooks with that deftness of touch with a Cosmopolitan in their hand. Those days were ridiculously fun, yet slightly taxing, as Melbourne was in the grip of an almost Wolf of Wall Street substance-abuse problem.

Teena had some great events at The Point. Situated in the middle of Albert Park, the restaurant is home to the whos who of racing for the Grand Prix, so shed get to trundle in during this spectacular event to watch the fine beasts tearing up the tarmac. Immersed in the adrenalin of racing, she was pulled up more than once for attempting a race time in our Suzuki Sierra soft-top on the way to work.

LONDON CALLING

Melbourne done, it was time to move on. We packed a backpack and landed at Heathrow with no real plan. Take it as it comes, go with the flow what the hell were we thinking!

Chancing our arm, we phoned around at the airport before catching the train into London. I rang Gordon Ramsays head office and got a trial with chef patron Angela Hartnett at the Connaught hotel, while Teena tried to find us somewhere to live, as wed only booked a hotel for the first three nights.

Working with Angela was brilliant. She rejected most of my first attempts to get a dessert on the menu, mostly because they were too cloying, and in hindsight damn ugly. Angela taught me a new way to cook: more feminine and nurturing, and less like a man dominating ingredients. Slowly the pastry team took more on, and soon we had an afternoon tea trolley, with the wonderful bakers Arlet and Alum to do the baking although Alum, a Muslim, sometimes fell asleep during prayer time, incinerating the