Melbourne has a deserved reputation for artisanal subculture, cafe society and somewhat self-conscious hipsterism, but when I heard about Flour Market – “the seasonal, specialty, artisan and underground bake sale” – my mind quickly conjured a flour-dusted Ned Ludd hurling choux into the machines, and conspiratorial tarts with Morse-coded messages arranged in their raisins.
I obviously had to go, both to satisfy cultural curiosity as well as instant appetite for experimental sweet and savoury treats.
Flour Market was started by four friends and now takes place four times a year. The Melbourne organisers brought a travelling Flour Market to Sydney last year and, with sold-out, queues-around-the-block results, rumours are they’ll be doing so again in February.
A Melbourne Flour Market was on last weekend at Collingwood town hall. It’s less a breaded cabal than a sugary warehouse party to celebrate the enthusiasm of an artisanal community for inventing new products and reinventing old ones. The bakers assemble a circle of stalls around the hall perimeter early, with “early bird” pre-booked customers admitted at 8.30am and doors opened to the public for a $2 entry at 9am. The Flour Market lasts as long as it has goods left to sell; with a crowd of a hundred punters lined up when I arrived before 8am to shoot photos, it was unsurprising when not a cream puff was left out by midday. Typically, a single stall shifts 900 items each time the event’s held. Queues out of the building for “hot” items are usual.
The bakers are a fascinating mix of creators, with diverse experiences of the baking life. Some are attached to premises – not only bakeries but in residence within cafes, takeaways and restaurants. Others are suppliers to existing restaurants and franchises, running distribution businesses from their cars. Others still are home bakers using Flour Market as a supportive environment to test products and make contacts for a foray into professional opportunity. It’s like a fringe festival of flour.
Linh Dang is in this last group. She’s 25 and has been baking since she left school. She’s preparing to launch her own baking brand, Amabelle, and she brings her signature wares to the Flour Market: lemon meringue pies adorned with edible flowers, a “Not a Carrot” cake that looks like a carrot in soil but is actually a banana and chocolate confection, and a remarkable salted caramel tart decorated with popcorn and gold leaf.
She’s looking for the kind of niche buyers who have been found by Morgan Hipworth, a stallholder a couple of tables down now known as Melbourne’s Doughnut King. Morgan may only be 14 but he’s been channelling his passion for avant-garde doughnuttery into a thriving small business that’s now supplying numerous Melbourne cafes. He is showcasing a white chocolate, rose petal and pistachio doughnut alongside his existing lines at Flour Market. His signature is a plastic syringe filled with addable jam stabbed into the heart of each dough ball.
Bistro Morgan is a hot stall at Flour Market and it’s his queues that are spilling out the door when I attend. He tells me that his passion for baking was the discovery that his creations “made people really happy”. It’s a sentiment shared by the bakers I talk to for why they’ve been up since 1am baking, why they’re often in bed by 8pm, why their lives revolve around ovens, car deliveries and lost weekends. Received happiness is perhaps why they’re so supportive of one another, and recommend each other’s goods – conspicuously, no one is jealous of young Morgan, despite his queues and reputation; they’re cheering him on.
It’s also perhaps why the bakers are able to mobilise such devoted labour from their supporters at Flour Market and beyond. While Morgan’s mother shifts doughnuts at the market, his father is out doing delivery rounds. Linh Dang’s Flour Market staff are a bustling gaggle of her friends, while Simone Clark, the baker from from Butterbing, has her partner, Trevor, on the table. Clark was a designer who left her desk job to bake full-time and her brownie cookie-sandwiches with cream filling have cult status among the customers of the cafes they supply. “I know this cake!” I blurt when I meet her. Butterbing’s love story – with careers given up and happiness found – is a popular flavour at the market.
Baker’s wife Toula, who’s selling her partner’s vanilla-slice doughnuts and infamously tasty cinnamon scrolls for the Candied Bakery tells me she fell in love with him for his baking. After a bite of my cinnamon scroll, I fall in love with him, too.
It’s a heady morning – not least for the cake fans who queue, taste, pile their trays with treats and spend the afternoon hashtagging photos of their finds on Instagram with #flourmarket before scoffing the lot.
Melbourne presumably also has an artisanal wellness circuit of kale pushers and quinoa gurus but it’s hard to beat the happy feeling provided spiritually and materially by the joyous bakers at an underground baking festival.
As I finished my day at Flour Market, I experienced at least one radical miracle. I ate every scrap of a 1,000-calorie beef pie without feeling guilty at all.
