17 Dec Harbour St Bakery, Oamaru

On the way to the Moeraki Boulders we stopped at the Victorian town of Oamaru. There’s mainly art and craft shops, bookshops, artisan stores like limestone carving and glassblowers, a bakery, ice creamery and also a steampunk museum, which looked interesting, but there was a $10 entry fee and we didn’t have much time to spend there, so we didn’t enter. Harbour St Bakery had bread, nice-looking pies and sweets like custard-filled croissants and other pastries. The two that caught my eye were the macaroon (gevulde koek, $5) and speculaas ($2.50). The boy told us that the speculaas was type of ginger cookie, so I went with the macaroon instead since I haven’t had one before. It was a bit expensive, but it looked nice. The outer cookie casing gave way to an almond paste filling, that wasn’t overly sweet, nor did it have that odd, almost artificial almond flavour that I often taste in almond cookies. Later I found out gevulde koek is a Dutch cookie.

Macaroon (Gevulde Koek, $5)