The food trends we've discovered via Instagram

So get out the party hats and balloons, Good Food's Instagram now has 50,000 followers. Thanks to everyone who follows our pixel trail of just-opened restaurants, recipes to make, Good Food events, well-frosted cakes, doughnuts and biscuits (yes, we are sugar fiends, too)!

Here's what we've learnt from our most popular posts, the Instagrams that you've strongly commented on and the first snapshot we uploaded back in 2014.

Drum roll please … Here's our most-liked post

It may only be three weeks old, but this photo of oven-hot camembert – full of gooey cheesy lava – from the Royal Hotel in Sydney's Paddington definitely had people double-tapping and 'heart'-ing Steven Siewert's picture like crazy. It was part of Carla Grosetti's explainer on how to bake a wheel of camembert. Try it at home to see if you can create a cheese volcano, too. Definitely no filter necessary.

We all want to eat a wreath

So we may have love-hate relationships with Christmas (presents are great, but enforced socialising with judgmental relatives not so much!), but one thing is clear – Good Food readers want Santa to bring them a pavlova wreath (or at least the ingredients to make one). You can re-create Emiko Davies' version with mulled wine syrup and blackberries with our recipe (and quite a few people would be keen, as this was our second-most popular Instagram) or be inspired by goodfood.com.au editor Sarah McInerney's version (laden with strawberries for the Sydney Good Food Christmas party – and sitting very pretty at number seven on our most-liked posts).

Heston Blumenthal still rules

There are not many chefs who can open back-to-back restaurants in Australia and have entire months' worth of bookings snapped up in a flash (or witness such intense demand for reservations that table scalpers exist). If Heston Blumenthal's popularity wasn't already obvious from his successful relocation of The Fat Duck and Dinner By Heston from England to Melbourne, then the big tally of hearts on our Instagram video of his classic meat fruit dish – hiding chicken liver parfait inside a 'peel' of mandarin gel – at the latter is just extra proof.

Katherine Sabbath also rules

Not that long ago, Katherine Sabbath was a Sydney teacher who loved to bake. But thanks to her sugar-spiked Instagram account (started in 2013), her online fanbase kept rising and rising – to the point she now has 262,000 Instagram followers, fans who flaunt tattoos of her desserts and a new career that doesn't involve geography or commerce classes. Our video of this self-confessed bakeaholic creating her watercolour raspberry, lemon and vanilla sponge cake is our fourth-most popular Instagram and the third most-commented post we've run. Channel your own Katherine Sabbath and make it yourself (for full effect, drop in a death metal soundtrack and use your dad's plastering joint knife as a cake scraper).

It's hard to say no to cake – and Black Star Pastry

Anyone who has queued outside Black Star Pastry's stores – or seen its signature strawberry watermelon cake overtake their Instagram feed – knows just how popular this Sydney patisserie brand is. (That particular cake alone earns enough to pay for half the staff's wages.) So, unsurprisingly, two of our top posts feature Black Star Pastry sweets. There was our snapshot of the orange cake with Persian figs (aka our sugary send-off for outgoing Good Food editor Ardyn Bernoth) and of course, our pic of that strawberry watermelon charmer to announce the opening of Black Star Pastry's pop-up at Books Kinokuniya. As reader @rosytintedglasses said in her comment on our post: "This cake is worth the long lines!"

We want to cook like Neil Perry

Who wouldn't want to be as kitchen-savvy as this legend of the Australian dining scene? The fact that Neil Perry's signature restaurant, Rockpool est. 1989, boasts three hats and plenty of awards doesn't mean that it's necessarily tricky to attempt his culinary style. In fact, his salt and pepper squid with aioli recipe takes less than half an hour to put together – so you can soon be enjoying this summer-friendly dish's snap, crackle and crunch (vegetarians can master Perry's vegetable paella, a one-pot wonder that also had a great reader response).

People are still nuts about Nutella

​Nutella fever hit the food world hard last year – and is still at epidemic levels. Things even reached a code red, with Melbourne legitimately running out of wholesale supplies of the spread in July, thanks to a local Nutella doughnut craze getting out of hand. Four of the five most-shared stories on Good Food last year featured Ferrero's choc-hazelnut creation as its main ingredient (with our article on Nutella-stuffed hot cross buns scoring nearly 50,000 shares on Facebook alone) and given that one woman was willing to spend $16,000 for a Nutella doughnut, it shouldn't be surprising that this frenzy would cross over into our Instagram, too. Our posts on the Nutella buns and Nutella arancini were among the most-commented, but the Instagram that scored the most OMGs, emoji, dashed-off tags and feverish keystrokes was our pic about the fact you can personalise a jar of Nutella – as our Canberra correspondent Natasha Rudra discovered.

We all have opinions about junk food mash-ups

When two brands collide in a clear attempt to get our attention, it works – because we all have our two cents about Smiths hitting our supermarket shelves with KFC Zinger chips or Cadbury's unholy marriage with Vegemite. We asked where you stood on the latter flavour combo, and you definitely let us know, because this post drew the second-highest number of Instagram comments on our account. Reader @loz_james90 claimed to have a life-dependency on Vegemite, but was willing to make an exception in this case, while @zoeshew took a seat on fence: "This is either going to be delicious or completely horrendous." Instagram followers @jademarie82 and @juzzybee both hunted it down for a try and gave it a lukewarm "OK" verdict.

You say cake, I say scallop

A reader question posed to contributor Richard Cornish led to state-wide (linguistic) warfare on our Instagram feed. So why is it that people in Victoria say "potato cake" instead of "potato scallop" (as most other Australians do)? When we polled people on Instagram, boy – did they weigh in! Most readers seemed to be Team Potato Scallop, but there were loyalists for the other side, too. As @foodinfocusz said, "A scallop is a bivalve mollusk (sic) not a piece of potato in batter."

And our first Instagram was …

So what was our inaugural snapshot uploaded to @goodfoodau? It was a pic of On Ramen's ramen burger at the Sydney Night Noodle Markets for 2014's Good Food Month. Given that culinary mash-ups continue to dominate attention spans (and appetites) – with Gelato Messina recently announcing its gelato doughnut sandwich bar for Sydney Festival – it seems like a pretty apt way to enter the Instagram game.

And, of course, you can follow us at @goodfoodau to see what we'll be snapping, uploading and hashtagging next.