This next suburb I wasn't even intending to cover. One morning, I was on the train heading northwest and spotted something intriguing from Marayong's town centre. This caused me to change my plans and drop in later that day.

Marayong

Marayong is a suburb in Western Sydney, far less known than its immediate neighbour Blacktown. It's accessible by train, taking 50 odd minutes from Central on a weekend, but I was fortunate enough to rope Mrs Completing Sydney into driving me here from her folks' house.

So what drew me to check out this dowdy town centre?

It wasn't the grocer,

who also serves up chai,

it wasn't the supremely recognisable local Chinese takeaway,

it wasn't the assorted financial services,

it wasn't the extremely suspiciously patched together awning,

and it wasn't the classic suburban Vietnamese bakery

(although we did make a light lunch stop for a tasty and hot-as-all-hell Vietnamese pork roll,

and an also-tasty chicken pie. In beautiful Western Sydney value, our lunch for two came to a princely $7.90.

It certainly also wasn't the newsagent who is probably-illegally plastering pictures of children who allegedly stole some drinks. I've blurred the faces because... you know.

So what caught my eye at this otherwise decidedly average Western Sydney strip of shops?

This Filipino cake shop named Mrs Ube.

Inside, we found a cabinet full of cakes,

and sweets that my non-Filipino eyes could not identify,

as well a huge amount of customers. Mrs Ube seems to be extremely popular with the local Filipino community,

so much so that when we eventually reached the front of the queue, the cake cabinet had been severely stripped.

Thankfully, there was still more than enough for us to enjoy a good variety of new-to-us sweets.

Item one - this purple cake-biscuit thing in "ube" flavour. It turns out that ube is a Filipino purple yam. So far so delicious.

Next was a calamansi tart. Calamansi is Filipino citrus and this was essentially a lemon merangue pie with a uniquely different citrus flavour. Also wonderful.

Third was that cupcake from the first picture. This turned out to essentially be a sponge-cupcake with cream and cinnamon-flavoured filling. It wasn't bad but was definitely the least exciting (i.e. most familiar) of the bunch. I thought it would be good to take a cross-sectional picture of the thing after biting into it, and the below image is the evidence of why this is not a food blog.

You can't have cakes without hot drinks. A cappuccino and a taro (another root vegetable enjoyed in Southeast Asian desserts) latte were a delightfully accompaniment.

The total for three pieces of cake and two drinks was $21. I can't tell you what this would cost in the East or the Inner West, but I guarantee it would be more.

With the goal of the Marayong visit checked off,

it was time for a more leisurely exploration of the suburb.

We hopped into the car and stopped at this gumtree-lined residential street.

Here, I saw some fairly standard Western Sydney suburbia, with regular brick homes,

and a really big park across the road.

Bonus gang of ibises.

Satisfied with this brief layover,

we continued on to an interesting looking point I'd seen on the map.

This really, really pointy church.

It turns out that this is a Polish church, as evidenced by the Polish flag flying beside the Australian (sadly, the wind refused to pick them up for a photo),