YEAST FRUIT LOAF

For years I have been in search of the sweet yeast and buns of my childhood. They were the memories of the bakery at the end of my Grandmother’s street, Werner Street, in Geelong…I have to add opposite from the Cats’ home ground and as hard as I have tried I cannot remember the name of the bakery.

The smell of sweet baking yeast was our morning wakeup perfume ritual and I quickly learned bakers were sentimental blokes who loved children. Werner Street was a bizarre mix of Irish and Protestant and I was desperately in love with Peter Finlayson a forbidden Irish Catholic and the adored naughty neighbour girls who painted their fingernails red and did square dancing in beautiful skirts, their mother a brilliant seamstress made. I remember a train journey to Warnambool to visit my Grandmother’s sister Auntie Min where my grandmother too furious with me for disobeying her to use acetone, filed the red nail polish from my little fingers for the entire journey. I later suspected she was more mad at Uncle Jack who lusted after these gorgeous girls than she was at me.

My Grandmother, a woman of great beauty I later pieced together, had a long standing affair with the shop owner [Uncle Jack] where she worked a few hours a day. It was a street of the 50s divided by religion that us kids failed to understand and completely ignored.

A fat little kid, the only small girl on the street, I was the one shoved daily to the huge bakery door, commanded by the older kids to ‘look sad’. I always wondered how a chubby, obviously well-fed kid could ever look sad, but I did my best. Bizarrely it always worked and baker dusty with flour, his whiskers and eyebrows powdered white, would give me the treasured ‘Boston Bun’.

It was round, about 25 cm and about 10 cm high with a hidden internal sparing smattering of currants, glossily glazed, thickly white iced and liberally dusted with coconut. Sixty five years later I can still remember the smell and taste and feel the warmth of the bottom of the bun.

Having gratefully thanked the baker I started to walk up the street, knowing the treasure would be ripped from my hands before I reached home. Even the snarls of my Aunty Betty’s Cocker Spaniel Chipper did not deter the boys of the street.

They tore it apart dividing in amongst themselves and I always knew my share was never fair.

This is just the start of where I will take this perfect dough…iced apple and cinnamon buns, London buns studded with currants, glazed with gritty sugar, of course the Boston Bun and so much more…AO