Find Caramel Layer Cakes and More at a New Roadside Microbakery in the Bush

Last Saturday, the first person joined the line for House of Suns just before 8.30am. By the time Broadsheet arrived at 8.45am, we were 12 people back. The microbakery opens at 9am every Saturday, in a bushy corner of the Blue Mountains. Since its early days in April, it’s been greeted with a lengthy queue – then sold out of its full spread of traditional Chilean cakes, stat.

As we wait in line ahead of opening, the roadside stall’s shelves are empty. And then Chilean baker Romi Gardella and her husband Dominic Hanly emerge from the track to their home, carrying trays laden with traditional Chilean sweets. It’s a very wholesome scene, all of us watching and waiting underneath the eucalypts.

There are large whole cakes topped with fresh whipped cream and blueberries, along with sliced-up serves of torta panqueue. What are perhaps the fudgiest brownies in existence join perfect piles of alfajores. Slowly the pair fill their homemade sunshine-yellow stand, with their dog and children trailing them back and forth.

“We just put it outside on the road and hoped for the best,” Gardella says about starting House of Suns. Then the best happened: word spread quickly via Tiktok, Instagram and word-of-mouth through Sydney’s wider South American population. “In my dreams, yes, I did hope that we would get to something that a lot of people would enjoy – that it would become a regular thing in their Saturday morning. But I never expected this. Like, I’m a stay-at-home mum with a passion for baking. It’s been so beautiful.”

The most remarkable thing – before the cake – is that not one person seems frustrated by the slow-moving line. Not Gardella, who greets each person, chats through the day’s line-up and then carefully boxes up their picks. Not the chatty group of girls in their hiking gear, the Chileans who’ve driven an hour into the mountains from Bondi, or the mother-daughter pair who are here specifically for another shot at the passionfruit alfajores they’d enjoyed a few weeks earlier.

The only guarantees each week are the classic manjar (Chilean dulce de leche) alfajores and the salted chocolate brownie cookies that people are “obsessed” with. The rest is whatever Gardella feels like making – and has capacity for. A lemon meringue pie, perhaps, then one made with winter oranges; or the sticky caramel layers of torta hojarasca, where thin crunchy sheets of biscuit are stacked high with the oozy caramel “a million times over”, with chocolate or meringue on top.

Gardella used to make her own dulce de leche, stirring milk, sugar and bicarb soda on her stove for hours. Now, due to demand, she purchases it from a supplier – freeing her up to handmake every other element, from sponge cakes and biscuits to vanilla bean crème patisserie and fruity compotes.

Originally, the self-taught baker had been in the kitchen purely for the love of it, but eventually “there’s only so many cakes you can have in your own fridge”, she laughs. She started baking for a local cafe, and South Americans started noticing. Word spread and Gardella got the confidence to give her roadside idea a shot. 

As the bakery continues its rise, Gardella is fundraising for the next step: a House of Suns food truck. “We will always have our roadside stand, it’s absolutely lovely, but I am dreaming bigger,” she says. “I want to be able to offer more goods year-round. My dream is to have the truck parked, and have a few little tables, so you can sit down, enjoy your treat, have a coffee – I want to offer you a little bush table under the beautiful eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains.”

Until then, make sure you rise early – there are no holds or pre-orders. “That way it’s special,” says Gardella. “You’ve got to get up.”

House of Suns
115 Farm Road, Springwood
Follow the road towards Martin’s Lookout and you’ll spot the little yellow bakery to your right hand side approximately one kilometre in.

Hours:
Sat 9am–sold out

@house.of.suns