Pierre Roelofs

Are you one of those talented people who skips straight to the final page of a menu to decide what you’re having for dessert before you can choose what the rest of the meal’s make-up? Will you travel across town for sweet relief?

Here, we present you with three of the city’s best sugar-coma-inducing treats and the places you’ll find them.

It happens once a week, in a tiny café off Smith Street. Each Thursday Café Rosamond becomes a temple to sweet hedonism as Pierre Roelofs serves up his dessert degustation.

There are no bookings, so be prepared to wait for your fix. You can choose between one and three courses, plus there are the famed dessert tubes, a single hit of flavour – it could be banana pancakes, perhaps, or lamington. We’d love to tell you what you’ll be served but we can’t since it changes each week. To tempt you though, it could be something like this hibiscus, berry and bubblegum creation (pictured above).

There are some things our personal trainers are thankful for and one of them is that we don’t live in South Yarra. For this is the home of Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio. So heavenly are its contents, dreamed up by talented pâtissière Darren Purchese, that you almost expect to find unicorns prancing around inside.

It’s hard to choose just one of the range of desserts on offer to take away. The cakes come in single serves and party sized, and there are homemade chocolates and jams and ice-creams (oh my). For a special occasion though, order the Just Like Lego cakes: sponge bases, chocolate velvet spray and, depending on the ‘blocks’ colour, either mango, lemon and lime, blackberry or raspberry mousse and jelly.

Set to open on March 5 is Timna Fried’s Parisian-inspired café and patisserie Sweet Crumble. The specialties include cupcakes in a raft of flavours, macarons, marshmallows and other confectionery.

But the sweet treat almost sure to be this year’s cupcake is the petite pop. Reminiscent of a truffle on a stick, these dainty cakes come in many of the same flavours as Timna’s cupcakes but are dipped in chocolate and decorated.

Café Rosamond
Rear 191A Smith Street, Fitzroy, (03) 9419 2270

Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio
647 Chapel Street, South Yarra, (03) 9827 7060

Sweet Crumble
111 Glenferrie Road, Malvern, 0488 988 053