I am writing this in the last week of December with my feet up and the ovens finally cold, because for once the shop is closed for more than a day. 2019 did not leave much room for sitting down. This was the year our little cinnamon bun shop in Mount Lawley stopped being a neighbourhood secret and turned into a full blown Perth obsession, and I want to get it down while it is still fresh, partly for us, partly for everyone who stood in those lines and made it happen.

The lines never really stopped

It started before the year did. From late November the evening queue was regularly running down the footpath and past our neighbours, and the photos people tagged us in on Instagram started looking less like a bakery and more like a gig. Then came Christmas morning. We baked triple and said so on Instagram, and at four minutes to midday the trays were empty and the sold out sticker went up on our story. The screenshot below is the actual story from that morning. It set the tone for the whole year. The sold out sign got so much use in 2019 that regulars started treating it as a challenge, turning up earlier and earlier just to beat it.

And the nights kept getting bigger. The photo below is a Saturday in March, taken from across the street because there was no room left on our side of it. Neon on, footpath full, cars slowing down to see what everyone was waiting for. Somewhere in there Perth decided that cinnamon buns were worth queuing for, and who were we to argue.

Breakfast hours, because Perth asked nicely

We opened in 2018 as an evening bakery, six until ten, buns out of the oven at dusk. All through the first half of 2019 the same message kept landing in our Instagram inbox, usually before eight in the morning: why does a bakery sleep in. Fair question. So we stopped sleeping in. We added morning and daytime hours, fresh batches from breakfast onward and proper coffee all day, and Mount Lawley responded the only way this suburb knows how. The first weekend of daytime trade there was a line at two in the afternoon. On a Sunday. In winter. For cinnamon buns.

Then all of Perth started baking cinnamon buns

Here is the part of 2019 I never saw coming. The whole city caught the bug. Cafes that had never sold a pastry suddenly had cinnamon buns by the register. Bakeries added them to weekend menus. Supermarkets found shelf space for trays of them. A few places went a step further and copied us outright, same look, same frosting, one or two recipes that felt a little too familiar. People kept asking whether that made me angry, and the honest answer is no. You cannot start something and then be upset that it caught on. Watching the Perth food scene scramble to keep up was the biggest compliment we got all year, bigger than any review. It confirmed what we believed back when we opened a ten square metre shop with a coffee machine rebuilt on a bench: this city was hungry for something made with real imagination, and once it got a taste, it wanted more of it everywhere. Perth got its appetite back. We are proud to have been the spark.

So thank you, Perth. Thank you for the queues in November heat and the queues in March drizzle, for every tagged photo, for treating sold out as a challenge rather than a disappointment, and for making a small halal bakery in Mount Lawley feel like the centre of the city. If you are new here, the story of how this corner got started lives on Stories, the Original Sinamon Roll and the Creme Brulee roll that caused all this fuss are in the online store, and the line, as always, forms from open until sold out.