What is a vanilla slice? Where to find the best of Australia's version of the French dessert

PLATE UP

We have to address something straight away: the nickname. Australia's vanilla slice, a cherished local creation central to bakery culture in Victoria and popular at school tuckshops and rural eateries across the nation, is also known as a "snot block". Australia, eh? We don't do reverence. We do, however, do apt description, because it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to understand why a baked treat of flaky pastry sandwiched around a large lump of gelatinous vanilla-flavoured custard would earn such a moniker.

FIRST SERVE

This isn't entirely our own creation. The vanilla slice is based on the French classic mille-feuille, a delicious pastry I have absolutely no hope of ever pronouncing correctly. A mille-feuille usually contains three or four layers of pastry with creme patissiere in between. In Australia, local bakers in the 20th century gradually phased out the extra layers of pastry and traded the creme patissiere for heavily set vanilla custard, settling on what we now know as the snot block.

ORDER THERE

Though the exact origins of the Australian vanilla slice are murky, it's fair to say that this is a particularly Victorian obsession, and so "there", in this case, is Victoria. To eat the best vanilla slice in situ, go straight to the winner of this year's Great Vanilla Slice Triumph: Sharp's Bakery in Birchip (sharpsbakerybirchip.business.site), about 3.5 hours north-west of Melbourne.

ORDER HERE

Again, for the purposes of this article we will refer to "here" as being somewhere outside Victoria. In NSW, try Gumnut Patisserie in Mittagong (gumnutpatisserie.com.au), which does a classically French, three-layered vanilla slice.

ONE MORE THING

Plenty of countries have developed their own version of the mille-feuille. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the "tompouce" has only two layers of pastry and a thick dollop of whipped cream. Hong Kong's "Napoleon" has buttercream and walnuts, and Poland's "Napoleonka" is very similar to Australia's two-layered, custardy iteration.