Cups and Cakes: Sugardough

A few Saturdays ago, my wife Lily and I headed down to Sugardough on Lygon St in East Brunswick.

When we first moved into Brunswick about a year and a half ago we dropped in one morning and had breakfast there, and hadn’t gone back until the aforementioned jaunt. We must have been in a bad mood, because for some reason we came away unhappy. I now know that it had to have been us, because the place is quite incredible.

Sugardough is a patisserie, bakery and café. It’s pretty much always busy on the weekend (and reasonably busy on weekdays), so you might want to head down early if you want the good stuff. As it’s a bakery, items can sell out quickly as they’re all baked in house daily. I went down this past Saturday at 9:30 am to snafu some Custard and Sultana, and Chocolate Brioches for our friends, and some items were already starting to sell out.

So now for the reason you’re all here, the ethical facts:

Sugardough uses the cleverly named free-range Green Eggs in all breakfast items, cakes and breads. You can eat any one of the wonderful cakes, pies, pastries etc without worrying about the fact you might be eating cage eggs, as opposed to some cafes where only the fresh cooked eggs are definitely free range. They also sell the eggs they use at the front of the store, as well as some specialty honeys (and I may have seen jams, I’m not sure).

Additionally, all bacon and ham is provided by Western Plains Pork. As I mentioned in my Coles sow-stall post, Western Plains provides ham and bacon to KR Castlemaine for their free-range products. This is one of the few instances I have found of a café using both ethical eggs and ham (another notable exception is the recently opened Pope Joan, where the waitress assured me their bacon was “like, massively free range”), and it’s great to see consistency like this. It means the business is actually serious about free range, ethical farming, and is not just pandering to hippies like Kim and I to win our egg purchase on a Saturday brunch.

While the source of the eggs is proudly announced around the store (the aforementioned Greens Eggs), the bacon didn’t receive the same fan-fare. The brand of ham/pork was listed, which meant I could give it a google search and find out more. I suppose it could be a good thing, showing that they’re willing to source their meat ethically without blowing their own trumpet, but why not celebrate it?

In any case, it made me very happy to know I could eat the wonderfully light and tasty, but very filling, breakfast pie without guilt. The pictures probably don’t do it, or the Red Velvet cake that Lily had (literally covered in icing from every given angle), justice.

The cakes, too, are magnificent and tasty. And as you can see, everything is very fairly priced:

Breakfast pie (see ingredients in photo above): $8.90

Red velvet cake: Approx $5

Salad: $5

Soy Flat White: $3.50 (X 2)

Tea: $3

Total: Approx $28.90

That’s a very cheap breakfast and way more than we’d generally have eaten. Lily took a lot of her cake slice home uneaten, and snaffled it a few days later. We could have probably eaten for under $20 had we not been starving on the day.

The service was great, the waitress who helped us was very happy to let us take photos after checking with her manager. We had a great conversation about the blog, and they seemed very supportive of the concept.

Well, if it can help direct people to wonderful cafes (/bakeries/patisseries) like Sugardough, then I think this blog will serve its purpose! It’s great that such good food is also ethically good, and is so affordable. It puts a lie to the idea that you have to spend big to eat ethical.

It’s well worth dropping in for breakfast or to grab some pastries, or bread, for a special event (or, maybe, just because you’re partial to pastries and are looking forward to stuffing your face). And it's all ethical!

P.S. If you want to have the best marshmallows ever made, grab some of their raspberry marshmallows. They're made with real raspberries (complete with raspberry seeds), and are wonderfully sweet and flavourful!