Benriach & Tokyo Lamington: When a Speyside Dram Slips Into the Lamington Tin.

Seasonal foods possess a peculiar authority over memory. They return each year with the quiet inevitability of ritual - the hot cross bun fragrant with spice, the lamington with its improbable cube of sponge, chocolate, and coconut - carrying faint echoes of other Easters: kitchen tables catching the afternoon sun, foil-wrapped eggs abandoned in bowls, the soft choreography of tea being poured while conversation drifts lazily between topics.

Taste, more than any other sense, has the power to retrieve these vanished rooms of experience. It was Marcel Proust who famously discovered this when a small madeleine dipped in tea released an entire architecture of recollection. One suspects he might have found similar revelations in a lamington - though perhaps not one quietly perfumed with Scotch whisky.

This started as a perfectly innocent Easter tradition. Then things got interesting.

Nostalgia, however, is rarely static. It mutates, acquires new accents, and occasionally emerges wearing something entirely unexpected. This Easter, the Scottish distillery Benriach has joined forces with cult Australian bakery Tokyo Lamington to reinterpret two seasonal fixtures through the aromatic lens of single malt. The results - the Scotch Cross Bun and the Scotch Caramel Easter Lamington - feel less like novelty pastries and more like small experiments in culinary translation.

The lamington itself has always been a slightly surreal object. Named, according to popular legend, after Lord Lamington, a British governor of colonial Queensland, the cake sits somewhere between folk tradition and national myth. Its geometry is curiously formal - a neat cube of sponge - yet its flavours belong firmly to the democratic pleasures of community baking. It is the sort of dessert equally at home at a school fete, a suburban afternoon tea, or a slightly chaotic office birthday.

What Min Chai and Eddie Stewart have done through Tokyo Lamington is gently unmoor the cake from that familiarity. Their bakery, conceived during a late-night conversation in a Tokyo park lubricated by a few too many highballs, treats the lamington less as a fixed recipe than as an adaptable structure. Sponge becomes scaffolding; the cube becomes canvas. Flavours migrate freely through the display case: yuzu curd, popcorn buttercream, peanut praline, torched meringue.

In other words, the lamington becomes a small edible thought experiment.

Into this lightly rebellious pastry universe steps Benriach, a distillery whose own history is marked by quiet defiance of orthodoxy. Established in 1898 by John Duff, the Speyside distillery has long pursued multiple stylistic paths simultaneously. While many distilleries confine themselves to a single identity, Benriach has historically produced three distinct styles of spirit: classic unpeated malt, Highland peat smoke, and triple-distilled whisky. Its warehouses hold an almost operatic assortment of casks - bourbon, sherry, rum, wine - each offering the spirit another possible trajectory.

Today that inheritance is guided by master blender Rachel Barrie, whose stewardship has emphasised the distillery’s remarkable aromatic generosity. The whisky chosen for the collaboration, The Original Ten, offers a particularly hospitable flavour profile for pastry. Its aroma unfolds like a small orchard in late afternoon: baked pear, apricot conserve, perhaps the faint blush of nectarine. Honeycomb sweetness glides across the palate alongside toasted almond, vanilla custard, and a whisper of oak spice that lingers like a quiet afterthought.

It is a whisky that suggests warmth rather than fire.

Within the Scotch Cross Bun, dried fruit is steeped with the malt before the bun receives a smooth whisky glaze. The transformation is discreet but unmistakable. The familiar Easter spices - cinnamon, clove, nutmeg - seem to open outward when brushed with the whisky’s orchard brightness. The bun remains recognisably itself, yet its flavour acquires an added dimension, as though an old melody had suddenly been accompanied by a richer harmony.

The lamington, by contrast, embraces decadence with theatrical enthusiasm.

The Scotch Caramel Easter Lamington begins with chocolate sponge gently imbued with whisky, giving the crumb a mellow aromatic warmth. At its centre sits a caramel whisky whip, aerated to near cloudlike softness, accompanied by milk chocolate mousse whose sweetness carries a faint trace of burnt sugar and cocoa nib. The cube is dipped in dark chocolate, rolled through cookie crumbs, and finally sealed within a glossy shell of chocolate that fractures delicately beneath the fork.

There is something faintly baroque about its construction. The layers accumulate like ornamentation on a cathedral façade, yet the whisky threads through the sweetness with surprising composure, lending depth and structure rather than simple intensity.

Both whisky and pastry are crafts built on transformation. Grain becomes spirit through fermentation, fire, and years of patient rest in oak. Flour becomes sponge through air, heat, and the subtle chemistry of baking. Each is a form of alchemy masquerading as everyday cooking.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once suggested that cuisine functions as a symbolic language through which cultures transform the “raw” into the “cooked.” If so, this collaboration speaks in several dialects simultaneously. Speyside whisky finds itself embedded within a quintessentially Australian dessert conceived during a conversation in Tokyo. A Scottish malt becomes an ingredient in an Australian Easter ritual.

Food has always travelled this way. Recipes drift across borders, absorbing accents as they move. The lamington itself likely owes something to European sponge traditions; the hot cross bun traces its lineage back to medieval England. What we call tradition is often simply the most recent moment in a long migration.

For those inclined to continue the experiment, Tokyo Lamington’s Newtown shop has introduced a whisky coffee for the duration of the collaboration. Honey syrup softens the spirit’s edges, vanilla cream lends a silken texture, and a measure of The Original Ten glides through the coffee like the final note in a jazz improvisation. The bakery calls it an “Afternoon Whisk-Tea,” a phrase so charmingly implausible it feels as though Lewis Carroll might have invented it after wandering into a Sydney café.

The collaboration will appear only briefly in bakery windows across Sydney and Melbourne before vanishing again into the seasonal calendar. Which feels appropriate. Some pleasures are meant to remain fleeting.

A lamington disappears in a few bites.

A glass of whisky takes a little longer.

And somewhere between sponge, chocolate, spice, and Speyside malt, another small Easter memory quietly takes shape.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Benriach.