Cake & Bake: The secret behind Jocelyn Hancock’s success

Handcrafted and customised is a mantra that’s behind the success of iconic Brisbane baker, Jocelyn Hancock. From her early days at Jocelyn’s Provisions to her latest Cake & Bake venture, the dessert queen is still keeping things simple, and delicious.

Jocelyn Hancock is the founder of Jocelyn’s Provisions and the beloved baker/owner of Cake & Bake. Pictures: Russell Shakespeare

Jocelyn Hancock’s baking queen status in Brisbane began via word of mouth, as all the best reputations do.

It was whispers of a tiny pop-up cake shop under the Story Bridge, back in the 1990s before pop-ups were a thing; it was people knocking on the door of her initially wholesale premises, requesting decadent desserts for parties and teas.

Now, 20 years after she founded, and subsequently sold, her iconic Jocelyn’s Provisions in New Farm, Jocelyn’s treats have returned to their inner-north roots in the form of Cake & Bake, the business she started in West End in 2015.

Jocelyn Hancock is the beloved baker/owner of Cake & Bake and the original Jocelyn’s Provisions. Picture: Russell Shakespeare/AAP

Cake & Bake opened its jaunty red and white doors in Commercial Rd, Newstead, in April, giving Jocelyn a second shopfront in Brisbane.

“It’s been 10 years since I left the ’hood, so moving back is exciting,” she says.

That heady, sugary aroma unique to bakeries wafts through the door of our meeting spot — a petite office leading into the baking area of her new shop. I linger on the way in, passing trays of spiced hot cross buns, chocolate and vanilla cakes waiting for embellishment, savouries, and friands with raspberry and rhubarb.

“It’s cosy in Newstead, but it’s still the same set-up and the same ethos that I had a hundred years ago — that our food is clean, fresh, delicious, handmade, preservative-free,” she explains. “Simple ingredients — fruit, flour, yeast, sugar and spice. That everything is handcrafted and customised is still the mantra.”

Jocelyn at home, in Teneriffe. Picture: Russell Shakespeare/AAP

Baking has been a lifelong love for the 53-year-old entrepreneur.

“I started JP’s because I could see there was that potential for retail — there was a need for it,” Jocelyn says.

“I was working at Yungaba (she leased the kitchen at historic Yungaba House, Kangaroo Point) in wholesale and I had this little vestibule where people would walk in off the back step to a couple of racks I had put up there.

“Whatever was left over from the bake — you know, if I had six loaves of corn bread or 20 baguettes or three chocolate cakes out of a batch I’d put them there, and it was this sort of unwritten rule that there was a cake shop under the bridge. James St was being built … there were the tilt slabs and a big plough of flattened concrete where the old Coca-Cola building was and I thought ‘this is a great new retail area and New Farm seems like a fun and interesting spot to live and work in’. The rent was cheap, and the rest is history.”

Jocelyn’s Provisions quickly became a Brisbane institution, known for its “real” cakes and desserts.

One of Jocelyn’s Cake & Bake creations. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

“It was great. I had this token shop out the front that was sort of this French antique shop with cakes in it, and I loved that space,” she says.

“Then we bought a warehouse on Commercial Rd — that we have now moved back to — and that’s where we did the baking.”

Jocelyn’s finely-honed baking skills and her clean-eating ethos are the result of a childhood spent on her family farm in Killarney, about 35km west of Warwick, and her dedication to learning the craft in kitchens in London and Brisbane.

There, she learned the cook’s trade from the ground up, but it wasn’t until she began specialising in pastries that she felt the spark of passion.

More deliciousness from Cake & Bake. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

“I was in the last two years of my four-year cook’s apprenticeship working at Rag’s, which was a restaurant in Caxton St in the ’80s that I had been desperate to work in, and I volunteered to do the cakes and desserts,” she recalls.

“And after a bit I just went — wow. This is me. I had grown up with people who baked cakes — mothers, aunts, grandparents who cooked all the time. It was just what I thought everybody did, so I sort of took to the butter-and-flour thing and loved it.

“Then I went to London to work in pastry kitchens and that’s where it really happened and I thought — this is my thing. It’s very different to grilling a steak.”

The 72ha family property at Killarney remains an influence.

Together with her firefighter husband, Myles Parry, and their two boys, Huon, 13, and Owen, 11, Jocelyn splits her time between their house at the farm and their city home in New Farm. Harvests from the land — lemons, plums, pomegranates — appear in her shop’s freshly-baked produce.

Jocelyn’s house at Killarney, Qld. Picture: Myles Parry

“The property is a big part of our life — our boys are fifth generation on the same land. My parents still live there, at the front of the block, and my sister and her family live about 10km away, and we all do varying degrees of farming. We agist cattle and have an orchard and bees, and we’ve done a lot of replanting trees. There’s still that definite connection to the land and it influences how I cook,” she says.

Jocelyn at her Killarney property. Picture: Myles Parry.

Jocelyn sold Jocelyn’s Provisions in 2009, intent on a sabbatical, but was quickly lured back. She spent 12 months developing a range of Hancock & Farm preserves and compotes, but baking (too much, she says) at home soon evolved into the business venture Cake & Bake.

I ask her what she loves most about baking and she reacts with a far-off look into the distance, a vibrancy to her words.

“It’s funny, but I’m a savoury person — I love cheese and olives and all that kind of savouriness,” she says.

“But I love dessert, too — a rose panna cotta that is just so luscious and voluptuous in its texture that you couldn’t stop eating it and don’t want to share — that’s what I love. Or a killer rich chocolate tart, or a fabulous, soft, lemony, luscious dessert like lemon delicious.

“I get an extreme amount of satisfaction from producing something and putting it together and blending the flavours, and putting it in the oven, and that moment that it comes out … it’s the actual enjoyment I get from someone eating the cake. That’s the buzz.”

Cake & Bake

58 Commercial Rd, Newstead

296 Montague Rd, West End