Every baker has a country they need to see before they can call themselves serious about their thing. For pizza it is Italy. For croissants it is France. For cinnamon buns there is only one answer, and it is Sweden. Swedes eat more cinnamon buns per person than anyone on the planet. The number people love to quote is more than 300 a year each, they have a national holiday for the bun on 4 October, and the kanelbulle is so much part of daily life there that the word for a coffee break, fika, basically means "sit down and have one". If you run a cinnamon bun bakery in Perth, you owe it to yourself to go and eat the original at the source.

So in March 2020, a year and a bit after we opened, I booked a research trip. Stockholm first, then a look at Germany, because a Swedish bun and a German bun are cousins and I wanted to taste both sides of the family. The plan was simple: eat at every bakery I could find, take a thousand photos, come home with ideas. The plan did not know what March 2020 had in store.

Perth to Istanbul, with buns on the brain

We flew out of Perth on the morning of 10 March 2020, up to Bali and then on to Istanbul with Turkish Airlines. Coronavirus was on the news, but it still felt like something happening to other places. The plane was full, nobody wore a mask, and the biggest worry I had was whether I would sleep on the long leg.

Research started before we landed. Breakfast on the flight came with a simit, the sesame crusted Turkish bread ring, and I turned it over in my hands like an engineer looking at a part. Turkish bakers make simit by the million every single morning, and the crust on that thing was better than most bread I had eaten in Perth. Istanbul airport then doubled down: the lounge had an actual simit bakery inside it, with a baker in whites shaping rings behind glass at nine in the morning. I took that as a sign.

Gate C1, Stockholm, 3 degrees

The next morning, 11 March, we stood at gate C1 in Istanbul looking at the sign every bun nerd dreams of: destination Stockholm, boarding, 3 degrees. That same day the World Health Organization officially called the outbreak a pandemic. We heard that news somewhere over Europe, and it did not change a thing about our plans yet. Sweden was open, the bakeries were open, and we had a list.

We landed at Arlanda late in the morning. My suitcase did not. Somewhere between Bali and Istanbul the tag on it had ended up saying Hannover, Germany, while my boarding pass said Stockholm, so the suitcase went off to see Germany a few days before I did. If you have never filed a lost luggage report in an airport where everybody is suddenly wearing gloves and checking the news on their phones, I do not recommend it.

The unplanned Hannover chapter

Germany was on the list anyway, so we flipped the order and went to get the bag. That is how I ended up drinking my first proper coffee of the trip in Hannover, looking out over copper domes and the three tall chimneys on the skyline, with a suitcase back in my possession and a day to kill.

I spent it in the Markthalle, the covered market in the middle of town, which is exactly the kind of place a food person should get lost in. Nuts by the scoop, smoked fish laid out like jewellery, and a bakery stall on every second corner. German bakeries are a different world to Swedish ones. Heavier, darker, more rye, more seeds, more bread and fewer sweet buns. Good context for what I was about to see in Stockholm.

Back to Stockholm the long way

On Friday 13 March we flew KLM from Hannover to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam to Stockholm. Two short flights, one long day, and by the time we got into the city it was dark. Which is how I found myself standing outside Fabrique on Nybrogatan at eleven at night, nose almost on the glass, looking at an empty display and the lights left on inside. Fabrique is the bakery everyone in Stockholm told me to go to. Stone ovens, cardamom buns, kanelbullar. Closed. I took photos of the empty window like a kid outside a toy shop and went to bed.

Saturday 14 March, the day the whole trip was for

The next morning we walked to the Fabrique on Fleminggatan, and there they were. Trays of kanelbullar coming out of the stone oven, glossy, twisted, covered in pearl sugar, sitting next to kardemummabullar, which are the same idea with cardamom in place of cinnamon. No frosting. No cream cheese. No glaze thick enough to hide the bread. Just a good dough, real butter, a lot of spice and a hot oven.

Here is what I learned standing at that counter, and what I still think about every time we mix a batch at Sinamon. The Swedish bun is a bread first and a sweet second. The dough has cardamom in it, not just the filling, so the smell hits you before the sugar does. The shape is a knot, not a spiral, which means more edges and more crunch. And the whole thing is smaller than what we make in Perth, because a Swede eats one with a coffee at three in the afternoon, every day, not one giant one on a Sunday. Different job, different bun.

That afternoon was the strangest part of the whole trip. Drottninggatan, the big shopping street, was packed. Families, prams, teenagers, nobody in a mask, cafes full, buns disappearing off trays. Sweden had decided not to lock down. Public events over 500 people were banned from 12 March, and that was about it. While the rest of Europe was shutting its doors, Stockholm was doing a normal Saturday, and to be honest it felt normal too. You would not have guessed from that street that the world was about to stop.

We finished the day in Gamla Stan, the old town, where every second doorway is a coffee house and the cobbles are older than Perth. Waffle towers in one window, cinnamon buns in the next, and at the end of the lane Bröd & Salt, another Stockholm bakery that takes its buns very seriously. We got there a few minutes before closing, bought a couple of kardemummabullar and ate them on the street in the cold. Fika, done properly.

A board full of red at Arlanda

Then the news caught up with us. On Sunday 15 March Australia announced that everyone arriving from overseas would have to self isolate for 14 days from midnight. Flights across Europe were being pulled by the hour. We had planned a few more days in Sweden, but the sensible move was to keep heading towards home while planes were still flying, and Berlin was on the way.

The departure board at Arlanda on the evening of 16 March told the story better than any news site. Copenhagen, cancelled. Helsinki, cancelled. Frankfurt, cancelled. London, cancelled. Our little easyJet to Berlin was one of the few lines not printed in red, and I have never been so glad to see a budget airline.

Berlin was closing while we walked it

Berlin had shut its bars, clubs, museums and gyms on 14 March, two days before we landed, and Germany closed its land borders with France, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Denmark on 16 March, the day we arrived. Restaurants were still open, with the tables pushed apart, but the city had gone quiet in a way Berlin never is. We stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate at blue hour on 17 March and there were maybe ten people on the whole square. Normally you cannot get that photo without a hundred strangers in it.

We still did the food. Berlin runs on Turkish food as much as German food, so it was döner kebab at midnight and kumpir, a giant baked potato buried in sour cream, the next day, both of them a reminder that the best things in a city are usually the cheap things. Rausch Schokoladenhaus on Gendarmenmarkt was open too, with the Brandenburg Gate rebuilt in chocolate in the window, which as a baker I could have stared at for an hour.

By the third night we were eating takeaway in the hotel room with the news on, watching the list of countries closing get longer. On 17 March the EU shut its outside borders to most travellers. On 18 March Australia told every Australian overseas to come home while they still could. On 19 March the government announced the border would close to everyone who was not a citizen or resident from 9pm on the 20th. We could still get in, but we were not going to push our luck.

Getting home before the door shut

We flew out of Berlin on 20 March with Emirates through Dubai, on a plane that was more empty seats than people. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean I realised it had been exactly ten days since the airport photo in Perth. Ten days, one lost suitcase, more airports than I can count, and a world that had changed shape completely in between.

We landed in Perth in the early hours of 22 March and went straight into 14 days of isolation at home, as the rules said. The next day, 23 March, cafes and restaurants across Australia were told they could do takeaway only from midday. So while I sat in my kitchen, the team was out there turning Sinamon into a takeaway window overnight, and I was on the phone to them every hour, useless and grateful. To keep my hands busy I baked. Pizza, bread, buns, anything. If you cannot go to the bakery, become the bakery.

What Sweden left behind

People ask if the trip was a waste, given how it ended. It was the opposite. The whole point of Sinamon was to take a bun that Perth did not have and make it the thing Perth talks about. Standing in a Stockholm bakery at nine in the morning, watching a city that eats 300 buns a year per person queue for kanelbullar without a second thought, was the most reassuring thing I could have seen in that particular month. Cinnamon buns are not a trend there. They are breakfast, they are a coffee break, they are what you bring to a friend's house. That is the culture we have been building in Perth ever since, one bun at a time.

And the technical stuff came home with me too. More cardamom in the dough. Respect for the knot. The idea that a bun can be a bread and not just a dessert, even when it is as big and gooey and torched as a creme brulee Sinamon. Every time I taste a proper Swedish cardamom bun I am back on Fleminggatan on a cold Saturday, and every time we bake I try to get a little bit of that morning into the tray.

Sweden, we will be back for the buns. Next time without the pandemic, hopefully with the suitcase.