Hitting the sweet spot

■ Got leftover hot cross buns? Try Darren Purchese's hot cross bread-and-butter pudding

Being sprayed with liquid chocolate by a Fairfax photographer is all in a day's work for Darren Purchese. Pastry chefs are accustomed to such requests now they've become media darlings - in fact, it's become a hoary photographic cliche to dribble molten chocolate over a pastry chef's head (the consensus is it works better with bald heads like Adriano Zumbo's).

It certainly wasn't like this when Purchese was starting out in his native England with an apprenticeship at the Savoy Hotel. ''In the old days it was pretty much that the chef would do the menu and the pastry chef would do his food.'' It was only a couple of weeks into his training that Purchese requested a move to the pastry section. ''I like recipes, precision and order - making something the same every time. Plus, ladies like dessert and I was a young guy.'' He read the play well. Long the understudy, dessert has stepped out from the wings to become the headline act. Pastry chefs like Purchese and Zumbo have developed an avid following thanks to TV (both have appeared on MasterChef) and all sorts of sweets, from cupcakes to the cronut, are being deemed queue-worthy by a trend-conscious public.

''Pastry chefs do the stuff people love at the end of a meal. It's an extension of the popular love of cooking, and it's also got a lot to do with fashion and creativity,'' says Purchese.Taking time out from making more than 1000 ridiculously cute blue chocolate chicks for the Easter rush, he makes a salient point: dessert's appeal is that no one actually needs to eat it. Dessert is the opposite of need. Dessert is pure, unadulterated, want. Hedonism in edible form, it no longer needs justification from the savoury end of things to prop it up.

Take the Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio's bi-monthly dessert degustations as an example: five courses - things like carbonated gin and tonic grapes with lime marshmallow, lemon verbena bubbles and lime curd - with matched wines. Not exactly cheap at $130 a head, they quickly sell out.

Over in Fitzroy, Pierre Roelofs is about to celebrate the fourth anniversary of his dessert-only nights at Cafe Rosamond. ''I reached the right stage of my career at the right time,'' says the Swiss-trained Roelofs. He feeds around 50 people every Thursday (his menu runs up to three courses for $40) but doubts whether Melbourne could support a nightly dessert bar - something the Adelphi Hotel is trying with Om Nom, although it supplements the nine desserts by Christy Tania with a short savoury menu as well.

Roelofs is content to stick to his single night a week at Rosamond, which entails 40 hours a week of work. ''There's more expectation. Desserts are getting better. It was more about structure and how it held when I started. There was pavlova and vanilla panna cotta - very sweet and rich but nothing overly technical or interesting.''

A few hundred metres away from the Sweet Studio lurks Zumbo's first Melbourne shop on Claremont Street; a flashy, silver and neon-decorated showboat for his glossy cakes - 'Pars the Strawberry Gran'' with its impeccable mirror of red icing - and his ''Zumbarons'' (macarons) with flavours such as salted caramel butter on toast and bread-and-butter pudding. Sydneysider Zumbo's nowhere in sight but at 11am there's a steady stream of customers getting their little taste of the rock-star of pastry, including a three-year-old girl with a mop of curls. ''Zumbo,'' she says, with eyes like saucers looking at the lolly-coloured display of macarons. ''Zumbo, Zumbo, Zumbo.''