Black Star Pastry Chadstone

Cult pastry shop Black Star was born in Sydney, but it’s gained a substantial following in Melbourne since the team brought its picture-perfect cakes to Carlton via a pop-up in 2019. Now the brand’s Melbourne flagship serves both as a cafe and a pick-up point for those tiered, eye-poppingly colourful cakes.

You can expect St Ali coffee, a selection of savoury options (look out for the open croissant with goat’s curd, olives and three types of tomato) and of course, all of Black Star’s signature sweets, including that signature strawberry-watermelon cake, dubbed “Australia’s most Instagrammed dessert” by the New York Times.

There are a few Chadstone each with its own background story. Take the Black Sesame Zen cake, made with wafer-thin milk-chocolate feuilletine, shiro miso cream cheese and candied black-sesame cheesecake (raked to look like a Japanese rock garden and topped with black-sesame-macaron “rocks.

Also local is the seven-layer Mango Yuzu cake, inspired by summer in the tropics. It’s bright, sweet and delightfully textured with chewy coconut sago, mango pudding, yuzu jelly, coconut-cream mousse, and yuzu-coconut ganache on a coconut dacquoise base.

If you’re having trouble finding the store, look for the giant metal halo that sits above it. It’s made up of a mess of jumbled, multilayered letters that make out the brand’s name when you face them front-on. And it’s inspired by “logomania”, the design concept where a brand name is explicitly slapped all over a garment (for instance, a Louis Vuitton monogram bag).