The scones at Miss Marple’s seem to have been baked in a kind of four-part loaf and split into four even squarish towers. According to reviews this apparently makes them contentious, like refusing to pray in a Norman square-towered church when you’ve grown up with Gothic.
The appeal of the scone is not its beauty, but its inscrutable taste: a bland, doughy buttress embraces a blitz of sweet/acid jam, the two opposing taste and texture sensations both then being subsumed beneath a cold, unctuous blanket of cream, synthesising a flavour complexity like no other. And from such a humble food item!
Miss Marple (she is almost a person at this end of the review) pairs her scones with Yorkshire Gold tea, a rich, smooth blend that is vastly superior to most caterer’s blend ‘English Breakfast’ contenders; in my opinion as good as my personal favourite from across the Irish Sea.
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Miss Marple’s Tearoom, 382 Mt Dandenong Tourist Road, Sassafras. Website: 'When we take your order there’s not an iPad in sight. We like to do things the old-fashioned way … '
Through the Looking Glass, 3/383 Mt Dandenong Tourist Road, Sassafras. Owner’s quote: ‘Get lost in our extensive collection, but beware - we’re all mad here.’
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Forgive the scone hyper-analysis. For years I trawled Melbourne's cafes in search of scone perfection. It was a semi-hobby; a break from my main occupation in the frenetic days of the eighties and nineties, when I virtually lived in sound studios and editing suites and on film sets writing, casting, recording and filming radio and television commercials. Adjourning occasionally from this world, I entered, almost astral-travel style, a parallel universe in which hatted and coated shoppers, sad-eyed sales ladies in black uniforms, vicars on the tear, and lonely and lost bookstore clerks clutching paperback Dostoevskys ate scones and drank tea, seemingly absentmindedly. Or they were zombies, in some twilight zone. Either way, in that sombre but peaceful world which seemed to lag mine by forty years, I made my way through thousands of scones and endless gallons of tea, deciding eventually on Melbourne's best scones. (List warning here: 'inexplicable human subjectivity'). Third was the Botanic Gardens cafe, which produced (and still does) towering scones of perfect granular consistency, served with enough jam and cream for the real estate opened up by slicing the scones. Second was the White Hen cafe in Little Collins near Georges, in which staff of the department store lunched and enjoyed scones lighter than the rarified air of the third floor of that venerable but long-departed institution. (The White Hen itself is also no longer.) In first place was the Cambrooke Cafe, a quiet oasis of taste in Block Place run by an Austrian couple, who served glazed, almost bagel-like, scones that took a European twist and were served with Austrian-style filter coffee and cream.
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