INTRODUCTION: SWEETS and TREATS

All Things Sweet has proved to be a sweet journey for us that’s extended well beyond the recipes you’ll try your hand at in this book. It’s now ten years since we published our first book, Bourke Street Bakery, and just over ten years since we opened our first little bakery café on Bourke Street in Sydney. That little corner café 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 children’s 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 I’d say: ‘When we have treats, let’s 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 children’s 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 there’d be riots…

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