650 Anglesea Rd, Freshwater Creek. Phone: 5264 5246

Despite its apparent fame – with those who live locally and those headed for some serious leisure time on the Surf Coast or Bellarine Peninsula – online information about Freshwater Creek Cakes has been hard to find.

So I am singularly unprepared for the fact that business does not have EFTPOS facilities.

The staff member who greets me tells me there’s an ATM at the gas station a few hundred metres down the road, so off I go … to find there is no such ATM and that I am left to make what I can of the single $10 note I am carrying.

No matter – it’s a pleasure to be around so much old-style goodiness.

Freshwater Creek Cakes has been operating at the same site since the mid-1980s.

It’s housed in a rather charmless building – the cool roadside signs give a much more evocative reflection of what I am expecting inside.

The No.1 hot-ticket item here are the sponge cakes.

They make about 100 a day and they come in four basic configurations – chocolate, vanilla with passionfruit icing, ginger fluff and a real old-school item called Victoria sponge with just jam and cream.

I don’t need EFTPOS or heaps of cash to know how very fine they are.

My Geelong Advertiser colleague Shaun had brought a couple to work a few nights previously and I happily slurped up a slice of the passionfruit/vanilla number.

Oh my! Deep, rich icing, feather-light sponge and the incredible, smooth and unmistakable texture of real whipped cream. None of that canned garbage here, folks!

Forget your chef’s hats and fancy awards – there is surely no greater praise than “just like mum used to make”!

The sponges cost $15.95 – a fair price given the quality of the product.

Like the cookies and cakes also on display, the prices here seem quite high – but that’s what you pay, I guess, for quality.

As far as bargains go, the day-after sponges are the go.

The bakery gets phone calls every morning inquiring if such items are on hand – not always the case.

They cost $8.

And as everyone knows, day-after sponges can often be even tastier and have, um, more structural integrity than fresh ones.

Confusingly, the cakes and loaves – which sell for about the $12-$13 – are both presented in loaf form.

What’s the difference between a loaf and a cake anyway?

The Freshwater line-up includes apricot and fruit loaf, date and nut loaf, pineapple and carrot loaf, banana cake, chocolate cake, lemon cake and orange cake.

The cookies sell for $7.95 a bag – and it’s on a bag of raspberry shortbreads that I squander the best part of my meagre $10.

They, too, taste “just like mum used to make”!

Freshwater Creek Cakes has a coffee machine but the eating-in options seem to be restricted to a couple of picnic tables to the side.