It’s pretty well known that I have a sweet tooth and a love of all things chocolate, biscuit and cake related. My friend Caroline is just as bad, so when I arrived in Sydney for a holiday she made it her mission to ensure I experienced the full sweet sensations the city had to offer.

First stop was ‘chocolate by the bald man’ Max Brenner, the incredible café where everything is made of chocolate – you can even get chocolate pizza! Smelling the delicious and decadent aroma of all thing choc, I opted for some amazing chocolaty pancakes and DIY hot chocolate.

You get a little china container with a tea light inside it, which heats up your milk above, and a selection of the most delicious chocolate buttons you can imagine. You put your little buttons in your milk and melt them to your taste, then suck the liquid up through a special straw. Choctastic!

Then it was down to the serious business of finding some cupcakes. Apparently there had been a revolution in cakes in Oz, with the opening of many dedicated shops, and Caroline was keen for me to experience them first hand. First on the list was Babycakes, a well-renowned store that sells, well, baby cakes. I had been told you could buy every kind of cake you could hope for in miniature – strawberry shortcake, chocolate mudcake, cheesecake and so on.

So Caroline and I drove to find it. And drove. And drove. Yet always we seemed to be on the wrong side of the railway tracks. We eventually got there, only to find it had closed. No! “Never mind”, we said,”‘we’ll come back another day”.

More successful was our trip to My Little Cupcake, a delightful shop with beautifully iced cakes in all different colours. We chose a good location for the first cupcake tasting – at Palm Beach, aka Summer Bay, where Home & Away is filmed.

Next up was Cupcakes on Pitt in the CBD, where you can get truly incredible flavours of cupcake – Honeycomb, Passion fruit, Cookies & Cream and Chocolate Sunday. Their bestseller was Lemon Meringue, which had a topping like its namesake desert. A seriously friendly place - I sat there for ages getting to know the staff. A great place to while away some time with a cake and a cuppa.

And of course, there were plenty of Aussie sweets and chocs for me to try – the likes of Cherry Ripes, Pollywaffles, Caramello Koalas, Strawberry Frogs, Redskins and Choquitos were all on the agenda.

By the end of my month of culinary delight, it was time to give Babycakes another go. This time we had two other visitors to Sydney in toe, eager to experience some cakey delights. It was a weekday and we had plenty of time, so we figured everything would go according to plan.

Not so! Again we drove around for ages, and when we eventually got there, the shop was closed – as it was due to on Monday. This unfortunate series of events has earned Caroline the eternal name of cupcake tease. Once was hard, but twice! Still, something to go back to Sydney for, as if I needed any other reasons…