Review: Bakerie@, Gordon

A few months ago, K and I finally sealed the last envelope on a Saturday morning and took a stack of invitations to a post office box near us. Done and dusted – weeks of agonising over the guest list and who to invite to which event (ceremony, reception, or Chinese banquet) was finally over, and personalised invitations were out in the mail! A celebration was in order, and what better way to celebrate than with delicious baked goods?

We walked up the road to Bakerie@, a little cafe and bakery located on Pacific Highway in Gordon.

It’s not the type of place where you would expect to find a little artisan bakery, and it stands out like a sore thumb compared to the shops around. Nestled in-between op shops, chemists, and real estate agencies, you can almost walk straight past the cafe without realising what delicious baked gems wait inside.

By the time we arrived in the mid-morning, the dine-in choices were already limited. They had sold out of their sausage rolls, was down to their last lamb pie, and many of the pastries and artisan sandwiches were sold as well. Disappointingly, we just missed out on their last cronut by a mere matter of minutes!

Choosing to eat in the cafe rather than get takeaway, K and I each ordered a pie – a chicken pie for me, and the last lamb pie for K. When you eat in, you get the pies served with a little side salad for only around $7 to $8 each…a real bargain, considering the size of the pie that you get.

The pastry on both pies were the real highlight – thick, super-layered, and incredibly buttery and sinful. It’s such a rich pastry that it’s almost a meal in itself. The filling is a bit more disappointing, and it becomes clear that Bakerie@ is really good at breads and pastry, but not so good at the other bits.

Drawn in and put into a delicious food stupor by the buttery melt-in-your-mouth pie pastry, we went back up to the counter after we finished our pies and ordered two dessert pastries to share.

The apple turnover was super flaky, and felt much lighter and less rich than the heavy pie pastry. I also liked the fact that it wasn’t too sweet either. Plus it’s got fruit in it…so it’s healthy right?

The chocolate croissant was more like the pie pastry – outrageously buttery, leaving your fingers smeared with sweet sweet butter and oils. It’s the little things that made this croissant fantastic – like the fact that the chocolate was evenly spread inside the pastry so you didn’t get that lump of chocolate that you sometimes find in less awesome specimens of chocolate croissants.

Determined to try the advertised cronuts that we missed out on on our first visit, K and I returned a few weeks later for another breakfast, earlier in the day in the hopes of getting there early enough for a delicious breakfast cronut.

Neither of us were particularly hungry that morning as we’d had a big night of eating out with friends the night before. Still quite full, we decided to split a sausage roll between us. As with the pies, the pastry was the real highlight here.

Very conscious of the amount of kilojoules that one might find in a cronut, we wisely choose to share a single cronut rather than order one each. I regretted that decision as soon as I took a bite, the burst of subtly sugared cinnamon in my mouth and delicate thin layers of pastry nearly left me crying with joy. The beauty of this cronut is that it actually isn’t as sweet as you would imagine, and certainly not as sickly sweet at the other glazed cronuts that you can get around town. This version is infinitely more of a crowd-pleaser, and dangerously more-ish.

I’ll definitely be back to Bakerie@, for more cronuts (apparently they do Nutella cronuts!) if nothing else! The prices are very reasonable as well, with sweet pastries averaging around $4.50, and the pies and sausage rolls under $8.