The Sydney Dishes You Should Know About: Humble Bakery’s Finger Bun

Finger buns – aren’t they a Bakers Delight thing?
Yes and no. We can go back a while here. Like a lot of popular baked goods, they seem to come from our home-baking tradition – some of the finger bun’s earliest mentions are in ads for baking supplies. Skip to the ’40s and you could find them alongside apple turnovers and lemon cheese tarts in places like the Rogers food hall in Goulburn, or grab one for a penny from the Woolworths on Pitt Street (along with roast turkey and seasoning, followed by rockmelon and ice-cream, on Fridays). An early Woolworths ad describes them as “light buns, favourites with butter”, with an illustration showing the familiar oblong shape and pink topping we now know and love.

So Bakers Delight didn’t invent them, then?
Definitely not, but they’ve done a lot for them. By the time Bakers Delight launched in the ’80s, the finger bun was enough of a staple to land on the opening menu. It’s never left, and they now come in an array of flavours: pink fondant, white fondant with hundreds and thousands, chocolate fondant, plain glazed, choc fondant and choc chip, white fondant and choc chip, pink fondant and white choc chip, Boston icing and coconut, Boston icing and pink hundreds and thousands, Boston icing and cinnamon. You get the idea.

A world of finger buns. But still, there’s a version at Humble Bakery that’s essential ordering, yes?
You bet. The good people behind Porteño and Wyno x Bodega have one sitting proudly in the display case at their Surry Hills bakery, Humble. It’s everything you want in a finger bun: light, sweet bread (with dried fruit baked in) split in two, smeared liberally with butter, then piped with delicate rose-coloured icing and sprinkled with coconut.

Sounds good – but pretty much like the original. Why’s it so special?
That’s the thing. Owners and chefs Ben Milgate and Elvis Abrahanowicz aren’t overhauling the bun, just nudging it forward.

“You see a lot of places trying to reinvent something, and we’re not into that. We don’t want to trick it up or put things that don’t belong in it,” says Abrahanowicz. Here, it’s the little things that make the difference. The fruit, firstly, is a mix of cranberries, raisins and currants, soaked to plump them up. The soft bun, made from a sweet milk dough proved with fresh yeast, is the same as one served on early Bodega menus. The sweet, fresh-tasting butter smeared on the inside is top-quality Coppertree Farms butter. And the sheer quantity of icing doesn’t hurt, either.

Wait, butter on the inside – is that common?
It sort of depends what you grew up with. Abrahanowicz was born in Argentina but moved to Fairfield in western Sydney when he was seven. He’d get his finger buns from the local Vietnamese-owned bakery that sold custard tarts and the like alongside pork rolls; they’d always add butter. But even he acknowledges it’s up for debate.

“Some people like it with the raisins or without, or with the coconut on top, and then people didn’t know about the butter in the middle. That’s the way I always had it, and Ben was the same – we make sure we put a decent amount in there.”

And the icing, is it anything special?
The lurid pink icing you often see on finger buns is fondant – basically flavoured sugar syrup and glucose dyed pink. Boston icing – the fluffy white icing with coconut, another common topping – is usually made with sugar and vegetable shortening. But at Humble, the bakers skip the fondant, and instead of vegetable shortening whip theirs up with cream cheese and that same super-lush Coppertree Farms butter. Then, instead of food colouring E120 – the one extracted from insects – they add drops of premium oil-based Colour Mill pigment colouring, which is designed to disperse evenly through the fat. The bun still has a pink hue, but it’s not the hot pink of the hot-bread shops, Baker’s Delights and school canteens of the world. It’s then scattered with good old-fashioned desiccated coconut. Nothing fancy, says Abrahanowicz.

So, it’s a classic version, then, but more delicious?
Well, there’s the supersized finger-bun cake available for pre-order, which is a whole other situation. But generally what makes Humble’s take so good is the respect for the original. It’s everything we remember – but with each part interrogated, then made that bit better. “I don’t think we try to make a better version, I think it’s pretty close to what [the classic] is,” says Abrahanowicz. “The classics are always classics for a reason – that’s why they’re still around.”

humblesydney.com
@humble_sydney

This is the second instalment of “You Should Know About This Dish”, a regular Broadsheet column where we eat and discuss the important, tasty and interesting dishes that make Sydney such a fascinating and nuanced eating city – and a world-class dining destination. The first instalment dug into Omu’s omurice.