Honey & Walnut collaboration candle

Monday, 26 August, 2024. Honey & Walnut Patisserie, Marrickville Road, Dulwich Hill. Almost a week to the day since celebrating my birthday with their iconic fig cheesecake, an invitation to meet at their incredibly chic café.  

Nelly offers me a coffee (oat latte for me) and brings an assortment of freshly baked biscuits alongside it. They’re warm and crumbly, with recipes that hark back to my Greek heritage. Nelly’s just as warm – to me and to the plethora of loyal customers who she continues to pop up and serve throughout our meeting if other team members are caught up. They’re a well-oiled machine without the rigidity that should come with that; in fact, the Honey & Walnut team (two couples bringing together their respective passions) are fluid and easy-going, bouncing off one another and always thinking of the customer first.

After a few nibbles of the biscuits, the conversation flows inevitably to sweets – cheesecake, to be exact. We start talking about the interplay between scent and flavour.

“The fig, honey and walnut cheesecake is our signature,” Nelly muses. “It brings people back again and again.”

“That’s our scent, then,” I say definitively, having eyed a number of their other bakes but knowing full well that the loyalists are devoted to the cheesecake. Delicious, moreish, overwhelmingly chic. It was a subtext we were determined to tie to cheesecake and candle alike.

We’ve met to discuss the opportunity for a bespoke candle to launch in time for Christmas. The power of scent marketing has been running through my head over the past few weeks, but the real pull is that chance to flex the true strength of Cavendish Ave., which is (in my most humble opinion) our ability to capture a moment and translate it into scent, with all the nuance locked into fragrance notes.

I leave the meeting with a generous box stuffed with cheesecake, pistachio slice, and an apple tart with a glaze that is truly to die for. More than that, I leave with renewed fire in my belly to create something worthy of the delectable cheesecake I devour in mere moments later that night.

Having jumped the gun a little, I’d already procured fragrance oils I thought would make a perfect foil to the Honey & Walnut cheesecake. I dive in to blending two distinct scents: one (I later label this ‘A’) a sweet and creamy concoction most true to the cheesecake itself with a real cosy figgy pudding vibe, and the other (‘B’) an elegant rendition taking inspiration from the flavour profile of the bake with a focus on fig fruit and leaves sweetened with a touch of brown sugar. I have my preference, but I keep mum when I meet with Nelly for the second time, armed with sample candles for the team to burn.

“The fig leaf is gorgeous!” Nelly jumps at ‘B’, the more true to brand scent of the two. Over the next few days, I receive emails from Nelly telling me the team are split straight down the middle on which is the preferred scent. By Friday, though, we have an answer: scent ‘B’ felt like it represented Honey & Walnut best while still nodding to the fig cheesecake itself.

Six weeks of candle pours later, the domed vessels are adorned with the bespoke Cavendish Ave. x Honey & Walnut labels (complete with the signature patisserie bee), and Nelly’s daughter helps us merchandise them on the patisserie shelves.

While Sydney’s Inner West has gained a new way to devour the most delectable cheesecake in all the land (or so the legend goes…), I’ve gained a newfound love of the bespoke. Translating flavour, colour, experience into scent is such a magical way to capture a moment, however fleeting. I think I’m in love.