My mother is well known for her infamous (oftentimes outrageous) sayings. The one I heard repeated most often was: “The best type of bun is a fingered one.”
Finger buns, known in the UK as iced buns, are a colourful staple of many Australian childhoods. Found in bakeries across the country, they are traditionally long, finger-like yeast buns (sometimes stuffed with dried fruit, mostly without) topped with a light sugar glaze, fluffy pink icing and desiccated coconut. They are typically eaten directly out of the brown paper bag they came in, or cut in half and slathered with butter (or margarine, in my childhood home).
This traditional finger bun has featured on the shelves of Australia’s largest bakery franchise, Bakers Delight, since the late 1980s. Its joint chief executive Elise Gillespie tells me they are now seeing “kids who grew up eating a Bakers Delight finger bun after school bringing their own kids in”. Kate Reid, co-owner of Melbourne’s Lune croissanterie, says: “Bakers Delight coconut whip frosting is the stuff that my childhood dreams were made of. How could you not feel nostalgic when it comes to finger buns?”
Higher end bakeries, patisseries, croissanteries (Reid’s included) and even gelaterias have tried their hands at updating the treat.
In a sign the trend is nearing its peak, in August the travel booking site Wotif ran a nationwide search for Australia’s best finger bun. The unsurprising victor was a viral bun from Humble Bakery in Sydney, owned by Elvis Abrahanowicz, Ben Milgate and Joseph Valore (who also operate the Sydney restaurant Porteño).
Made with soft, sweet milk dough, filled with cranberries, raisins and currants, then generously spread with top-shelf butter and coated in thick baby-pink cream cheese frosting, Humble’s finger bun is so in demand that it has started offering a cake-sized version.
Mike Russell from Baker Bleu, a sourdough specialist with outlets in Sydney and Melbourne, says the finger bun moment has evolved from nostalgia. Bakers who grew up eating basic versions are now titillated by the prospect of making something similar but fancier. Tom Mitchell, a co-owner of the Sydney patisserie Shadow Baking, says he loves that they can take a French pastry technique and give it “an Aussie twist”.
Both Humble and Baker Bleu’s finger buns were inspired by fussy eaters. “My youngest is a terrible eater,” Milgate laments. “He will only eat bread from Bakers Delight and won’t touch a Humble sourdough.” Russell says his 11-year-old nephew “doesn’t like any of Baker Bleu’s bread, he is a very vanilla kid. I wanted to make him happy and so I put a finger bun on the menu.”
Gelato Messina, one of Australia’s most popular gelato chains (where Mitchell is also an executive chef), has a finger bun gelato – brioche gelato with whipped cream, raspberry puree and coconut icing – on its specials rotation. It proved such a hit Gelato Messina collaborated with the skin care brand Standard Procedure on a finger bun-flavoured lubricant for Valentine’s Day last year. It sold out within minutes.
The finger bun glow-up doesn’t end there. Shadow Baking has started selling a finger bun pain suisse – flaky pastry filled with coconut frangipane and raspberry jam, topped with icing and desiccated coconut.
But nostalgia can be a double-edged sword. People are clearly drawn to the recreations of their childhood classics but they can also have very strong reactions when those classics are “messed” with.
A real sticking point is whether or not a finger bun should contain raisins or sultanas – or any fruit, really. I am strongly against. It feels almost disrespectful; and I am not alone.
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Bakers Delight are “definitely in the no fruit camp”, Gillespie says.
Pamela Clark, who was a recipe developer for the Australian Women’s Weekly for 50 years, describes the addition of sultanas as “someone having stood in some other suburb and thrown them in. They aren’t to be included.”
Nadine Ingram, the owner of Sydney bakery Flour and Stone (who has also sold cardamom-spiked finger buns as a special), says she likes “the idea of a finger bun, so long as it doesn’t stray too far from the integrity of a finger bun”. As a child, she never chose the ones with sultanas in them. “That’s just wrong,” Ingram says. Reid, whose croissant version was filled with coconut frangipane and house-made strawberry jam, describes sultanas as “dead flies”.
Though Milgate says he “hates sultanas in general” the bun at Humble is filled with three types of dried fruit for “a little bit of health”.
I would have considered it sacrilegious, that is, until I ate one. To try it, I used the “Humble hack”, Milgate’s instruction to cut the bun in half and “flip the lid”, sandwiching the soft cream cheese icing over a thick slab of butter and a sprinkle of salt, to avoid any mess. The soaked fruit didn’t detract from the flavour, only enhanced it. With one mouthful I was immediately transported to my childhood, swinging my legs over my nanny’s kitchen counter at the end of a hot summer’s school day.
Such is the power of food. I would have given Humble’s finger bun top of the leaderboard for that feeling alone. I wanted to bottle it up and swallow it whole (just not as lube).
Nostalgia, like sex, sells. You could be forgiven for thinking this is what has pushed us to peak finger bun but it turns out we got there in the 1980s and never looked back. Bakers Delight still sell “around 99,000 finger buns every week” – that’s closing in on 5m buns every year.
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