The pale yellow spread is spread thickly on the improbably white bread. Then – slap! It flips on to a plate and a shallow sea of hundreds of thousands which tinkle gently when disturbed. A firm press on its back before it returns once more to the chopping board, now a rounded square of confetti-coloured sprinkles boarded by a creamy whiteness and deep tan outline. It is then cut, correctly, into triangles. The fairy bread is done.
While party food has evolved and ebbed with time and trends, fairy bread has remained a constant in Australia over the decades. As children’s parties have eschewed soft drinks for kids in favour of craft beer for adults, as French onion dip and Jatz have given way to hummus and lavosh, and birthday cakes have morphed from accidentally kitsch buttercream and licorice strap masterpieces to tiered nude towers crowned by edible flowers, fairy bread has remained.
“One simply does not party without sprinkle-covered bread,” says Katherine Sabbath, baker and author of cookbook Bake Australia Great.
The first known reference to fairy bread comes out of the early Depression. The Australian National University’s National Dictionary Centre suggests the first report of fairy bread at a children’s party was in the Hobart Mercury in 1929.
In its persistence through bust and boom, fairy bread has become part of Australiana iconography; rendered as jewellery, textiles and handbags. It is nostalgic, democratic.
And while a handful of northern European countries partake in sprinkle-type objects on dry toast, fairy bread remains distinctively antipodean in a manner that is more celebratory and approachable than a meat pie or sausage sizzle.
For Sabbath, however, its persistence is yet more straightforward.
“It is accessible, affordable joy on a plate,” says Sabbath. “It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s no-fuss. A lot of parents already have these ingredients at home. So if you’re looking for something to delight a bunch of five-year-old kids, then it’s just a go-to.”
At a recent four-year-old’s birthday party in Sydney, I spied chocolate crackles and zucchini dip. Piles of watermelon, grapes and plums, hummus, rice crackers, focaccia, veg sticks and chips. But the children did not care. Under a tea towel and at precisely eye height, they discover a tray of fairy bread, nearly a whole white bread loaf’s worth. And before the bread could get dry and firm around its pillowy edges, it was gone. A few errant sprinkles soon mopped up by desperate, slippery little fingers.
“Fairy bread to me – it’s appeal is that it’s greasy and crunchy. But it’s also soft and delightfully fluffy,” says Sabbath.
“It’s the closest you can get to cake, without having to wait for the cake to be wheeled out at the end of the party. It’s like cheating. It’s there hiding with all the snacks, masquerading as food. But it’s not. It’s cake.”
The correct way to make fairy bread, says Sabbath, is thus: “You definitely need cheap, fluffy white bread, because that’s the closest thing you can get to the texture of a cake,” she says. No sourdoughs. No wholemeal.
The fat must be spreadable and soft. She will not weigh in on the butter v margarine divide, but to say that butter must not be straight out of the fridge.
And the sprinkles? “Go as traditional as you can,” says Sabbath. The round sprinkles are perfect, she says. Some of the more upmarket sprinkles look impressive, but when you bite into them, “it’s like biting into uncooked spaghetti”.
To love fairy bread, and to continue its tradition, she says, is to accept it in its purest form.
“It’s never going to be low sugar. It’s never going to be low carb. It can be gluten-free, sure. But you need the sugar, you need the carbs and you need the fat. The trifecta of deliciousness.”
And in that persistence and universality of its white-bread fatty sugariness, fairy bread is, in its own way, defiant.
