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 (AT INITIAL VISIT – JULY 2022)
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.
REVISITED, MARCH 2023
This seasonal hot cross bun ($4) was really solid. There was a great amount of fruit – both of the citrus and dessicated grape variety, as well as a little bit of spice that set this HCB apart from from the crowd. Not too sweet at all.
This everything bagel croissant ($8), ordered for my fiancée in honour of the recent Academy Award winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once, was more than met the eye. I didn’t know, when I ordered that it would be filled with wilted spinach and some feta-like substance (I have reviewed the images and there was no description posted anywhere in the bakery), but I’m glad it was, because $8 would be too much for just a croissant encrusted in some seeds. This ended up being a really tasty combination, with the crunch of the croissant exterior, the butteriness of the pastry, the salty and fragrant sesame seeds and the savoury and creamy flavours from the filling all combining to create an almost spanakopita like croissant (a fitting prelude to the quarter-Greek wedding we went to later that day). This gets a thumbs up from me but not my partner (she does not like spinach, even though this was ordered specifically for her. How rude.)
I have no complaints at all about this miso, eggplant, pumpkin, and togarashi croissant ($7.50) which was yummy with all its vaguely Japanese inspired ingredients combined with good pastry-work.
The last item in our breakfast were these fig danishes ($8.50 each), which they gave us two of instead of one in a very nice gesture as they were nearing the end of day. These were not bad, and I know I’m being annoying because 1) I’m kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth, and 2) literally in my initial review of this place in July 2022 I complained extensively about things being a bit too sweet, but I did think these were not super flavourful. I don’t know exactly the reason – perhaps it was time based – but there just wasn’t a huge amount of flavour in the figs compared to the most recent fig pastry that I had at Lucien in Parramatta. Despite this, I did enjoy them, and in particular was impressed by how big and filling they were for the price, and again the quality of the laminated pastry at the base. We not only enjoyed the first danish on the day we got them, but also the second one on the following morning.
COMMENTS
This clearly wasn’t my doing, as Pegfeeds definitely doesn’t (and if I’m being honest, shouldn’t) have the readership or cone of influence to actually affect anyone’s business in any shape whatsoever, but I was really impressed that none of my complaints about extreme sweetness I had the first time around were applicable on my second visit. Instead, both the savoury and sweet flavours were well balanced on my second visit, though maybe a bit lacking in the fig danish.
Solid.
Goodwood Bakeshop
297 Marrickville Rd, Marrickville NSW 2204
0420 543 837