The sweet taste of success

You heard it from the horse's mouth. Celebrity pastry chef Adriano Zumbo says choux pastry is making a comeback. So is mille-feuille. It's another dose of sweet seduction from MasterChef's macaron tower maestro who has four Sydney patisseries to his name.

For the record, he does 25,000 macarons a week and salted butter caramel is the most popular flavour.

RECIPE: Zumbo's Strawberry & Vanilla Ganache Macarons

"Choux pastry is popular in Europe, where things have gone more traditional," Zumbo says. "Patisseries are recreating classic desserts from the old days, like the mille-feuille, tarte tatin and tiramisu."

His latest take on choux is a traditional chocolate eclair with chocolate creme patissiere and a chocolate mirror glaze made with a bespoke cocoa blend named after his mother.

The mille-feuille has coconut jelly, a coconut macaron mix and coconut creme patissiere with mascarpone between two sheets of puff pastry.

Slick work for a 30-year-old Balmain boy who grew up on junk food in his parents' supermarkets in Coonamble, near Dubbo, and got his first job in a pastry shop icing cupcakes long before they became trendy.

Tip Top lamingtons, potato chips, liquorice allsorts, Allen's Shapes, eucalyptus drops and musk sticks, he ate them all.

"I learnt a lot from eating junk food," he says.

"All these companies have great R&D sections because they've got to make a viable product that's cost-effective and has to last, so my approach as a pastry chef is to have a bit of fun with a lot of those flavours and remake them into something fresher and more interesting."

He's used milk bottle lollies in a cereal cake, Vegemite in a Vegemite and peanut butter cake and Milo in macarons.

"I used to eat Vegemite rolls with peanut butter Vita Wheats in the middle, so the memory's all there," Zumbo says.

"We do a Vegemite macaron on Australia Day and we used to do a Redskin macaron but couldn't keep up with demand. The shop we bought them from always sold out, so we had to take it off the menu. We just blitzed them with cream to use as a filling."

He's not afraid to challenge the tastebuds: Kalamata olive cake is a classic mix of salty and sweet, with olive oil biscuit, olive oil ganache, lemon and olive oil creme and vanilla-candied Kalamata olives.

Others are named after people and places. A "Marry Me Ed" (it's his barista mate who's been snapped up and is now a father) has coffee creme brulee, apple raisin compote, walnut parfait, walnut nougatine, walnut sponge and chocolate glaze.

There's also an "Ed Knocked Me Up" and a "4 Times the Vitamin C" with blackcurrant jelly and marshmallow, vanilla violet mousse and pistachio.

You get the drift.

The most popular is still the V8, another MasterChef torture test, with eight layers of all things vanilla: creme chantilly, toasted brulee, water gel, ganache, macaron, dacquoise, chiffon cake and almond crunch. A V8 Diesel is made with dark chocolate.

New cakes are added every few months and a winter "collection" is due in six weeks with revamped tarts, gateaux de voyage and macarons.

Adriano Zumbo's sweet tips:

·If you're making a cake, have everything ready: oven on, baking tray greased, ingredients weighed. Whatever you do, don't crack your eggs into the mix, start whipping, then go looking for something you've missed. By the time you come back, the mixture will have dropped.

·Have all the ingredients, especially eggs, butter and milk, at room temperature. You will find they whip and amalgamate better.

·Temperature is the key to making a smooth custard butter cream. Some add the butter when the mixture's still hot but it tends to split and you end up with a grainy result. Wait for it to cool.

·I love raw caster sugar. It's a bit more earthy than white sugar, especially for cakes. Preferably don't use regular sugar in baking because it has a bigger granule, which is harder to dissolve.

·Experiment with different flours. We buy our flour direct and have it milled in Sydney, so it's quite fresh and absorbs more water, which gives a moister result and better rise for breads and cakes. You can buy 1kg packs of different flours from health-food stores and gourmet grocers, then add your own raising agents.

Adriano Zumbo will be in Perth for the Good Food and Wine Show, which runs from July 13-15 at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. Tickets are available from ticketek.com.au/goodfood