An Aussie Treat

Whenever I have mentioned fairy bread to people, they’ve responded with a cringing look of confusion. For those who don’t know about this common treat loved by countless children in Australia and New Zealand, you are quite frankly missing out!

I even looked up the term ‘fairy bread’ on Wikipedia recently just to make sure that it wasn’t some figment of my imagination that I dreamed up as a child before our family came from the 'Land Down Under' to settle in Canada in the late 70’s. Sure enough, this is what I found as a definition…

“Fairy bread is sliced white bread cut into triangles, spread with margarine or butter, and covered with ‘hundreds and thousands’ which stick to the spread. Fairy bread is commonly served at children's parties in Australia and New Zealand. The origin of the term is not known, but it may come from the poem 'Fairy Bread' in Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885.”

‘Hundreds and thousands’, by the way, is the Aussie term for what Canucks refer to as ‘sprinkles’, or those multi-coloured tiny balls of hard candy that we sometimes like to adorn ice cream or birthday cakes with.

Recently, we just happened to have some grocery store bought white bread and ‘hundreds and thousands’ in the house simultaneously… two out of three of the essential ingredients for fairy bread. The nostalgic child in me couldn’t resist, so I slathered on the margarine and sure enough, it was just like those long lost times that still seem so real yet feel like a lifetime away.

So before you cringe, give it a try or at least let your kids be the guinea pigs. You and they might be pleasantly surprised.