Jenny’s Bakery and the failure of self control

Jenny’s isn’t a hidden gem. It’s aggressively visible. Everyone knows about it. There’s no crowd spilling out onto the street, but inside they’ve had to implement a ticket system, which tells you everything you need to know about how this is going.

There’s a reason.

It’s good. Unhelpfully good. The kind that overrides whatever superior skinny version of yourself you had planned for the week.

You take a number. You wait. You get the thing.

The cinnamon knot is a problem.

It’s taken too far. Deliberately. The pastry pushed right up to the edge of burnt, then held there, caramelised into something that feels less like baking and more like a controlled failure. It shouldn’t work. It does.

I don’t even like sweet food. Or at least I maintain that I don’t, in the same way people claim they “don’t really watch TV” while quietly working through six seasons of Bojack Horseman.

Put one of these in front of me and that position collapses immediately.

There’s that experiment with children and marshmallows, where the ones who wait are rewarded later, and the ones who don’t are, statistically speaking, on a shorter path to poor decision making and low-level criminality.

I eat it in the car. Straight away. No delay, no dignity, barely any awareness of what I’m doing beyond the fact that it needs to happen quickly, before some higher function kicks in and suggests otherwise.

At no point does Jenny’s attempt to intervene. There’s no sense it wants to help you make better choices. It simply produces the thing and leaves you alone with it.

Which is probably the correct approach.

I’ll be back.

Not out of loyalty. Out of a complete failure to better myself.

Jenny’s Bakery is located in Adelaide, South Australia, and is open daily for pastries, coffee and baked goods (hours vary, typically early morning through early afternoon).