By the middle of December the shop had settled into something we had not seen before: a normal day. Two months of lines down Walcott Street, the kind I wrote about after opening, had softened into a steady trickle. Regulars still came, and the mural still stopped traffic, but you could now walk in at seven on a Friday and be served inside a minute. As nice as that sounds, it worried me. A ten square metre bakery does not get to coast. It is either the thing people talk about or it is on its way to being empty.

The quiet week

I sat the team down one night after close and put the question to them: what comes next. The easy answers were a discount or simply baking more of the same. Neither felt right. The Original Sinamon Roll did not need rescuing. It needed a rival from inside our own cabinet, something that would give people a reason to come back and argue over which one is better. I wanted something no bakery in Perth had. If we were being greedy, something no bakery anywhere had.

Stick to engineering

My idea was a Creme Brulee cinnamon bun. Take the set custard and the burnt sugar lid you would normally crack through in a restaurant ramekin and build them on top of our roll, so the spoon goes through glass before it reaches the spiral. We searched that night and could not find anyone, anywhere, doing it. The team heard me out for about ten seconds and then started laughing. Stick to engineering, they said, leave the baking to us. They meant it kindly. I did not take it kindly. I have spent my whole life taking things apart to see why they work, and I had just spent October rebuilding a coffee machine on a bench, so being told a dessert was beyond me was exactly the wrong thing to say to me.

One day of burnt sugar

The next morning I came in early and ran it the only way I know how, as an experiment. The whole problem is sequence and temperature. Torch sugar on a warm bun and it weeps. Pour custard over a cold one and it slides straight off. Frost first and torch straight after, and the flame eats the frosting before the sugar ever sets. The first tray soaked. The second scorched. Somewhere around the fourth, the order of operations clicked: bake the roll, cool it all the way down, set the custard frosting on top, dust the sugar, then torch it hard and fast so the surface turns to glass before any heat reaches what is underneath. I tapped it with the back of a teaspoon and it cracked the way a proper one should. The shop went quiet for a second. Then the same people who told me to stick to engineering asked if they could eat the evidence.

The line came back

We put it in the cabinet that week with a handwritten sign and no announcement. It sold out the first night. Instagram did the rest, and by the weekend there was a line on the footpath again, people asking for the burnt one, the crack one, the one you hit with a spoon. Some nights it outsold everything else in the cabinet put together, and I will admit I keep the tally behind the counter, because watching a joke you were laughed out of the room for become the thing people queue for never gets old.

The slow bun

Here is the part nobody warned me about. The Creme Brulee roll is slow, and it refuses to be rushed. Each one has to bake, cool right down, take its frosting, and then meet the torch moments before it is handed over, otherwise the glass top goes soft. On busy nights that means the person at the front of the line stands there while a small flame does its work, and everyone behind them leans in to watch, and by the time it is their turn most of them have talked themselves into ordering two. Nobody has asked for their waiting time back yet.

The Creme Brulee cinnamon bun has not left the cabinet since, and I do not see a day when it will. Of everything we bake, it is the one I am proudest of, because it exists for the oldest reason in the world: somebody told an engineer he could not do something. If you ever come across one made before 2018, bring me the proof and your coffee is on me. And if you would rather just eat one, the Creme Brulee Roll is in the online store, torch included in the price. More of how this corner came to be lives over on Stories.