Bakery
Our most recent Marrickville Vietnamese meal was desserted by a trip down the road to Goodwood Bakeshop, a new-ish bakery offering an assortment of savoury and sweet pastries as well as a range of breads baked on premises. Despite their popularity and a small line down the street, our experience was a festival of speed, with good clarity of displays (sans pricing), a limited and focused offering, and a lack of seating all contributing to fast service.
My first and favourite bite from Goodwood was of their Miso Peanut Butter Cookie ($4), a rich and buttery cookie with a soft centre and crunchy exterior, with umami miso and peanut butter flavours that were delicious and most importantly not too sweet. The light coating of roasted sesame seeds on the superior surface of this cookie served to enhance its Asian-ness, making it overall a good cookie that I would recommend to an Asian or non-Asian friend.
The aforementioned peanut butter cookie was eaten on the street outside the bakery, though the four other sweet treats that we tried were eaten at a secondary location.
The Apple Cardamom Hand Pie ($8) was my first non-cookie bite, and sadly too sweet for my taste. I enjoyed the multi-layered pie crust, but felt that the sticky, sweet filling was a bit overpowering of the whole.
I enjoyed the croissant portion of the Lemon & Hazelnut Twice Baked Croissant ($8), with its nice and crispy crust and buttery interior folds, but again felt that the additions, in particular the lemon marmalade filling, was too sweet for my liking.
At the risk of repeating myself, the Pecan Cardamom Orange Scroll ($8) was again too sweet for my liking. The pastry of this scroll was appropriately dense, and I enjoyed the spicy orange and cardamom flavour and generous helping of pecans within. This would’ve been a winner, in my opinion, if the top layer of icing sugar had been left out.
After hearing me complain about the last three pastries, you will be surprised to read of my thorough enjoyment of this vanilla slice($8). This slice offered a reprieve of the sugar load from our previous entries, with an unusually thick and viscous custardy filling complete with black dots, the universal sign of vanilla excellence. While the pastry wasn’t paradigm changing, the filling was in my opinion quite special and most importantly “not-too-sweet”. Excellent.
OVERALL THOUGHTS
The majority of what I had at Goodwood Festival of Sweetness was too sweet for my liking. As always, it’s possible that my preferences in terms of pastries are culture-bound, as “not-too-sweet” is used as a common phrase to denote praise of a dessert in Chinese culture. I’d like to come back for some savoury treats that will hopefully be not-too-salty.